


Each to Each

by KarieSenkow (MukatKiKaarn)



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Giant/tiny, Interspecies, Lesbian Character, Macro/Micro, Mermaids, Mouthplay, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Original Universe, Psychological Bonding, Romance, Science Fiction, Shared Consciousness, Size Difference, Size Kink, Soul Bond, Symbiotic Relationship, Vore, mermaid - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:53:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MukatKiKaarn/pseuds/KarieSenkow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a distant alien world, a teenage girl enters a partnership with one of the native merfolk by merging with her, body and soul. The bond between them, though, will become more powerful than either of them imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was a piece I literally thought up on a whim; I thought, hey, wouldn’t gentle vore with a giant alien mermaid be really awesome? And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, so I made up a whole damn world and these two characters expressly for that purpose.
> 
> I have absolutely no idea how good or bad this story is, as far as quality of writing or how enjoyable it is; I literally wrote it because I couldn’t help writing it. I just wanted to make this particular scenario happen. It’s written in a way where, if the story flops, it’ll stand nicely by itself, but if I do decide to continue it, I can. So we’ll see.

 

 

  
_"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?_   
_I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach._   
_I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each._

_I do not think that they will sing to me._

_I have seen them riding seaward on the waves_   
_Combing the white hairs of the waves blown back_   
_When the wind blows the water white and black_

_We have lingered in the chambers of the sea_   
_By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown_   
_Till human voices wake us, and we drown."_

-excerpt from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot

~

It was Maria’s turn to feed Sessyne.

She was nervous as she made her way down the metal, spiral stairway leading to the lower levels of the floating research facility and colony where she lived. She knew well enough that this day would eventually come, and her name would be selected to visit the home of the Ichthyian who lived in the bottom level of the colony. Butterflies fluttered in her belly, her mind buzzing with nervous thoughts, her pace speeding up and slowing alternately as curiosity and anxiety pushed and pulled on her.

This was silly, she told herself. All of this worrying and such. Plenty of the other students in the school had fulfilled their responsibility to feed Sessyne and were none the worse for it. A few even glowed with excitement after their time spent with the mermaid, unable to keep from talking about the experience for days afterwards. The thought of spending time in such intimate quarters with a creature native to the world they had become visitors to was certainly an exciting one.

It was simply the fact that the encounter would result in settling into the Ichthyian’s stomach for a time that frightened her.

She reached the bottom of the stairwell and stared at her reflection in the metal and glass door leading to Sessyne’s ‘room’ in the colony. Maria bit her lip as she stared at herself in the glass panel in front of her; at 16, she looked about as awkward as any other human teenager. Her body was soft, her school uniform stretching a bit around her belly and hips. Her legs still weren’t much longer than they had been as a child, and her chest seemed to be taking it’s time filling out, which led to more than a little time dallying in the locker room before and after gym class.

Maria wasn’t ashamed of how she looked. She knew, though, she wasn’t winning anyone’s attention for beauty any time soon— at least among her peers.

She sighed and slid her ID card through the reader, which chimed happily in response. The deadbolts in the door retreated with a thunk and the door itself slid open with a slight hiss at the change in atmosphere between the Ichthyian’s chamber and the rest of the colony.

Maria breathed deep; the room smelled of the sea. Considering much of the floor was open to the ocean below the colony, the salinity of the air only made sense. She made her way inside, slipping out of her shoes before approaching the pool. Her host was nowhere to be seen. Her mouth opened soundlessly as she pondered whether to call out to ask if anyone was home, when the waters in front of her started to stir.

A few bubbles broke the surface, at first. Then the water rippled and broke as the crown of the woman’s head, as well as the long, sail-like fins rising out of her back, lifted upwards. Sheets of wet hair formed themselves around the Ichthyian’s head, dripping water onto lilac colored skin. Maria could see the silhouettes of arms and hands press against the wall below her feet, while her tissue-like fins laid flat against her back as it broke the surface.

Further back, Maria could see the shape of the woman’s tail reaching across the length of the pool. Most described the Ichthyians as merfolk; beyond having a humanoid torso with a fish-like tail in the place of legs, however, the looked very different from Earthly fantasies of beautiful, seductive women who swam the seas in search of sailors to drag into the depths. She was beautiful; that went without saying. Waves of colors, ranging from a pale pastel purple to an almost inky indigo hue, rippled down her back and tail like the waves reflecting back and forth across the pool. Her hair crinkled and curled as it dried, twisting in wide, gentle loops of rich, green strands around her face. She was, though, still quite different from what the sailors of centuries ago must have imagined mermaids would be like.

The biggest difference was, of course, her size.

Sessyne was massive. Maria was intellectually prepared for her host’s size. Her biology lessons explained clearly that Ichthyians measured between 90 and 120 feet in length and displaced several tons of water. It was very different, though, to stand before one of their kind and realize how neatly one could sit in the palm of their webbed hands. As the second-shortest in her class, Maria felt absolutely dwarfed by her host’s presence.

The Ichthyian’s gills laid flat against her neck; her mouth opened wide, gulping in a mouthful of air from the room. A cavernous view of dark violet flesh and sharp teeth greeted Maria for a moment; she stepped back from the pool’s edge without thinking about it. The mer-creatures were not carnivorous; that too, she remembered from school. The teeth were for defense, meant to maim and kill other predators that stalked them in this world’s wild, endless ocean.

Maria fumbled for words, lips flapping uselessly as Sessyne laid her arms against the edge of the pool. Great, dark pupils, ringed in purple irises, stared out at her. She could see her reflection on their surfaces, she realized. Look at her face, Maria told herself. Focus on her face, on her eyes, and not on her mouth. The giant’s face was flat, mostly featureless; the Ichthyian had no nose to speak of beyond a simple bump between and below her massive eyes, with two narrow slits covered over by a dark, fibrous membrane. Simply something to allow her host to breathe gaseous oxygen and prevent water from rushing in when she dove back into the ocean.

“Are you my companion these next few days?”

Sessyne’s voice was melodic; that particular detail was in-line with the Earthly notion of mermaids, at least. She seemed to sing her words as much as speak them, the ebb and flow of her speech hardly different than waves cresting against a shore. Thin lips, tinged slightly darker in color than the rest of Sessyne’s skin, curled into a sweet, pleasant smile. “It is… my pleasure, to have you here, with me.”

Maria breathed nearly as deeply as the mermaid had as she sat, crosslegged, on the deck that surrounded the pool. “You… you speak my language very well, miss.”

The mermaid nodded. “I have spent several years, perfecting my knowledge of it. It eases our relationship with humankind, if we are able to communicate, as you do, each to each.”

“I tried learning your language once, when I was little.” Maria laughed a little at her memories, trying to imitate the sound of the Ichthyians into a digital recorder. “You’ve definitely had better practice at ours than I’ve had at yours.”

Sessyne laughed again. “Your voice box simply is not like ours. You should not be so difficult on yourself.”

Maria nodded; her face felt warm. She wondered why she was blushing. “Do you understand,” Sessyne continued, “what is going to happen to you?”

“I think so.” In theory, it was simple enough. Part of secondary school orientation was an introduction to the Ichthyian Companionhood Project, which explained the basic biological workings behind what would happen to the human partner, as well as the repeated assurance that the encounter was perfectly safe. “I will… I’ll enter your mouth, where you’ll… you’ll swallow me up. I’ll spend the next 30 hours or so in your stomach, where you will gradually absorb life energy from me. Whatever that actually is. Afterwards, you’ll ease me out of your stomach back in this pool so that I can return home.”

Sessyne nodded. “Additionally, of course, our bond to one another will allow me to share the depths of the oceans of our world with you. You will see in your mind as though you are seeing through your own eyes. You will sense what I sense. Our minds will be intertwined with one another.”

It was definitely a most unusual relationship, Maria thought to herself, but one that worked well and maintained a spirit of peace and cooperation between the two species. Humans gained the ability to explore the depths of Sessyne’s people’s world without the expensive transport of deep-sea vessels across light-years of space from Earth. The Ichthyians gained a universe worth of knowledge about worlds they could not and likely would never see for themselves. It was a relationship that grew and flourished during the decades of exploration since humanity first arrived on Rahabat.

“If I understand correctly,” Sessyne said, “your people have created special clothing that will ease the connection between the two of us. You can wear these, or no clothing at all, if you wish.”

Maria felt her face burn hotter at the thought of standing bare before the giant; her mind filled with images of her sitting around her classmates changing for gym class. “I… I think I’ll wear one of the suits,” she said, quickly scurrying across the floor to a booth in the corner. She pulled a curtain across the opening and breathed deep. It was stupid, she told herself. Sessyne wouldn’t care. She surely didn’t have the same notions of beauty and body that humans did. She could stand stark naked in front of the giant mermaid and she would hardly bat an eye.

She shook her head and pulled open one of the drawers, searching for a dive suit that would fit her.

“If I have caused you to feel discomfort,” Sessyne called from the pool, her voice ringing softly off the walls of the pool room, “I apologize.”

“It’s okay. I just…” She breathed deeply, holding out at arm’s length a bodysuit that seemed like it was the correct size. She opened the back and laid the uniform out on the bench beside her, working on undressing out of her school uniform. “I don’t know if you quite understand how… how intimate…”

The giant laughed again; unlike the children she grew up with, the ringing, resonant sound always seemed genuinely happy. There was none of the tinge of backhanded cruelty that children showed at times to one another; it didn’t seem to mock, or condescend, but only showed an amusement with something unfamiliar to her. “The similar-ness between the act of human reproductive behavior, and the connection between my kind and your kind, is apparent to me.”

“You make that sound so clinical.” Maria crinkled her nose. It would be, of course, at least to Sessyne. Humans must be a biological curiosity to Ichthyians, who had no concept of land or anything that would live on it. That didn’t make it sound any less strange, though, to actually hear the idea of making love phrased in such terms.

The mermaid lacked eyebrows; the ridge, though, in her brow lifted in response to Maria. “I think that is because of… what are the words your people use? What I mean to say, and what I result in saying, being… ‘lost in translation’?”

“I guess so.”

Maria pulled the dive suit up over her skin; the fabric pressed tightly against her, squeezing at her belly and thighs as she drew up the zipper and locked it into place. “It’s so tight,” she said, whimpering. The material fit to every curve and bulge of her flesh; it was hardly flattering, she thought, to say the least. “Okay,” she called out to Sessyne, “Please… don’t laugh.” She pondered her words for a moment, then shook her head, and stepped back out onto the deck.

Sessyne’s great, dark eyes tracked her as she walked across the platform; Maria felt self-conscious, not only at how the suit fit, but at how she must look from above. Years before, as a surprise, one of the colony’s teachers had brought a pair of mice back from a trip to Earth; the pair became the class pets. Was this, Maria thought, what those two little brown mice felt like as they scurried around in the sawdust and twigs lining the bottom of their cage, while the watchful eyes of a dozen elementary school children looked down on them through the glass walls of their home?

“Are you ready?” Sessyne said, the same pleasant expression on her face as when she first rose up out of the water. “Or… do you need to spend more time, to feel comfortable with me?”

Maria blinked, staring up at the Ichthyian. “We don’t have to do this right now?”

“No, if you are not ready. Ideally, it would be best for me to have you inside of my stomach by 22:00, your time. That way, I can be sure that you will exit my body in time to rest and prepare to return to school.”

“Could… Could I have a little time?” Maria bit her lip.

“Of course.” The giant nodded towards the opposite end of the pool. “If you would like to, you can follow me to the shallows. We can sit more closely together, over there.”

 

 

~

The pool itself was of considerable length; the rooms inside the educational wing of the colony where she attended class would mostly fit inside the pool room if they were arranged like blocks. The end she first entered on was the deeper end, the bottom plunging to a depth of 100 feet. At the opposite end, a gently sloping shelf was built into the floor the gradually dropped to a 10 foot depth before plunging like a cliff into the open middle. There, further down than anyone could see, the pool opened up into the ocean that surrounded the colony and covered the entire surface of Rahabat. The world of Sessyne’s people, one that— Maria told herself— human beings had only begun to explore.

The Ichthyian herself was a new world to Maria, as well. It was the first time she’d been this close to the creatures that dominated Rahabat’s ocean. The scales the covered her tail continued up her back and onto her shoulder, each individual piece sliding over the ones around it as she swam across the pool. The length of her body undulated through the water, her hair spreading out across its surface as she kept her head up. “Is it hard,” Maria asked, struggling to find something to start conversation with, “to breathe air? For your people, I mean.”

“It is somewhat of a… an unusual feeling to adapt back and forth, from water to atmosphere.”

“But it doesn’t hurt?”

The giant shook her head, not struggling at all to maintain her pace swimming alongside Maria. “No, it does not hurt. It just feels… strange.”

“What about… when I’m…” She looked down, poking at her own, rounded belly. “Will it hurt to be inside of you?”

“You seem to think often about pain.”

Maria paused, while Sessyne lifted her body onto the shelf of the pool’s shallow end, water cascading off of her body as she turned up onto her side. Her skin look smooth and polished, gleaming under the electric lights above them from how wet it still looked. The giant’s chest adjusted to her new position, now that the bulk of her body rested out of the water. It was hard not to think of the mounds resting against the Ichthyian’s rib cage as breasts, even if she knew that the species were not mammalian, and that the curves were merely the result of fat stores and other tissue structures that served to provide for the needs of the giant’s prey while contained within her body.

Prey. It was strange to think of herself in that light, even though she knew that at a basic level, this was what she was to Sessyne. Even though she would survive their encounter, the Ichthyian would still feed off of her, draw sustenance from energies that apparently emanated from their bodies, ones that the human colonists still struggled to understand.

Sessyne rested her elbows on the bottom of the pool, laying on cheek on the backs of her webbed hands, watching as she set down at the edge of the pool. “Are you,” the giant said, “often in pain?”

Maria laughed. “Not physical pain. Well… not really pain, at all, I don’t think. I’m not really hurting. I just feel…” She shook her head, staring up into the glassy surfaces of Sessyne’s eyes. “I don’t think you’d understand. Ichthyian kids probably don’t grow up the way we do.”

The giant nodded, and turned carefully to lay on her belly, her elbows dipping into the water to rest against the bottom of the pool. “Perhaps,” she said, “part of the problem is the language barrier between you and I. It is simple to study the sound and structure of a language. How to speak it, how to arrange words. But… it is another thing, beside that, to express complex ideas in another language.”

She laid one hand against her chest, between and just below her ‘breasts’. “The heart, however… souls speak the same language. A language of thought and energy, information drawn from the senses. Words are merely constructions designed to interpret the raw data our mind takes from our senses.”

Maria blinked; she wasn’t expected the Ichthyian to discuss philosophy with her; she hadn’t really expected that there would be much in common between the two of them that they could speak so abstractly about. “I’d… never thought of it that way. But I guess you’re right. It’s just all… electricity crackling around inside our brains. All energy.”

“Currents of light and sound and impression. This is no different than sea currents, deep within the ocean.” Sessyne leaned down further, bringing her head closer to Maria. She could feel the giant’s breath on her, cool as the spring breezes she enjoyed standing on the observation decks at the colony’s upper-most levels. “Perhaps…” Sessyne continued, “Perhaps the flow of this energy is constricted within yourself. Unable to circulate. Blood circulates; breath circulates as well. Water circulates, maintaining temperatures across our world. Our world, if I understand properly from what your kind have taught us, circulates around our sun. All things wish to move this way.”

“A constriction of my heart.” Maria bowed her head, staring down at her own chest. She certainly felt small, tight, constricted inside. The stares of her classmates, of the children who lived in the colony, all made her retreat deeper into herself. Each time, growing up, that they called her a name, each time that they laughed and told her to go away, she curled up tighter into a ball within herself. “That sounds about right.”

“The energy is in too small a space. The space within me is abundant;” Sessyne said. “I will share the space within my heart with you.”

Maria blushed; was the Ichthyian coming onto her? She wasn’t even sure what it felt like for a member of her own species to express romantic love towards her. That manner of love was an entirely different animal than that from a parent expressing their tenderness, of a teacher or mentor expressing pride in a devoted student. Surely, she told herself, she was reading into things. Desperation, or something like that. That, and Sessyne surely didn’t understand the connotation of what she was saying, what it meant for a human to ‘share their heart’ with another person. “I don’t think…” she said, stammering. “I don’t think you understand what those words mean to a human.”

“Perhaps I do not. It does not matter. I do not wish for you to feel pain.” Sessyne closed her eyes. “The world, and the universe itself, are vast, cold places. They can feel very cruel, and without emotion. It is the least that two beings can do for one another, the idea of expressing kindness and comfort.”

“You’re very sweet, Sessyne. I have no idea if you understand the words you’re using, I have no idea how what I feel must look like to you. I don’t know what you do and don’t know about our culture, our lives, who we are, but…” Maria breathed deep and stood up, walk out further into the pool, closing some of the distance between her and the giant. The water rippled around her legs, quick, rapid waves from her skin shivering beneath. “I think we will both find out, now.”

“You are ready, then?”

Maria nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Yes,” she said, a slight squeak to her voice. “I’m ready.”

The giant shifted again, more of her body slipping back into the water, until her chin dipped down into the pool. “I will open my mouth to you,” Sessyne said, watching as Maria waded out towards her. “When you are ready, lay back onto my tongue, and I will take you into myself.”

The Ichthyian’s breath grew easier to feel as she drew closer; Maria stared in awe as the giant opened her mouth, the long, dark muscle of her tongue lifted from its bed behind her teeth, uncurling itself as it reached towards her. Maria’s heart pounded beneath her breast as Sessyne’s tongue reached the water just in front of her. She was going to be safe, she told herself. She was going to be safe.

Hands trembling, she reached out, laying her palms against the surface of the woman’s tongue. It felt slick, soft, like the foam mattress of her bed. The flesh sank in around her hands as she pressed into it; when she pulled her hands back up, strings of a sticky substance stretched between them and Sessyne’s tongue, breaking apart in a spray as she plunged her hands into the pool to wash them. The thick liquid was cool, unnervingly so for something that came from within a living creature; maybe it was best, then, that she did force herself into the dive suit.

She pressed back into the giant’s tongued and lifted herself up, dipping the tip of the muscle down into the water with her weight as she hoisted herself onto its upper surface. The suit kept out the damp of the tongue’s coating as easily as it did the seawater in the pool; her neck and head, however, were bare, and reminded her of the strange coolness the moment they made contact with their bed.

As soon as she laid down, the tongue lifted up from the water and retreated into the giant’s mouth. The grey of the ceiling and brightness of florescent lights were quickly replaced with the pale, purple flesh that lined the inside of the Ichthyian’s mouth. She braced for the dark as the woman’s jaw closed up, only to blink in surprise at the dim lighting emanating from the surfaces around her. Between its dimness, and the hues of purple and blue arching overhead, she felt as though she could close her eyes and sleep here.

No, she told herself. She was going to watch this. When her classmates asked— and they would ask, most especially the ones who haven’t experienced this yet— she wanted to be able to say something.

The tongue bucked and twisted under her, provoking a gasp out of her. Sessyne was turning her around slowly, carefully, until she was again laying down, facing back towards her throat, an utterly unfamiliar portal compared to the structure of a human mouth. Instead of the hanging ball of a uvula, rings of rippling muscles opened and closed, pulsing tighter and wider in perfect rhythm with one another. Sounding boards, she remembered from biology class; it was the final part of the mechanism that contributed to the complex sound of Ichthyian speech and song.

Sessyne’s tongue eased her closer to those rings, sloping gently, allowing her to slide backwards towards her throat. All the while, its mass curled around her, forming a tube open only at its top and end. Could the giant taste her through her clothing, Maria wondered? If she understood the bond they would soon share, it would be a question she would pose to her companion once they were settled together.

There was pressure at her back; she slid forward and felt something slick grip her feet. Her companion’s throat pulled at her, urging her into its grasp. Smooth, plush walls quickly formed around the contours of her body. Her breath rushed out of her as the last of her body slipped free of Sessyne’s tongue and plunged finally into the passage beyond.

The rippling waves of peristaltic contractions pulled on her through the thick flesh that enveloped her body. Maria trembled as the Ichthyian’s throat made contact with every intimate point on her body, all at once, over and over again. She couldn’t help but squirm; her body was too unfamiliar with being touched like this. Each twist of her body, though, only pressed her more against the rippling walls moving her downward. A gasp, muffled by the same walls massaging her, escaped her. No wonder her classmates looked forward to this moment, but spoke in whispers to each other about it in the hallway or by text on their handheld tablets!

Then, without warning, the walls peeled away from her body, the tight passageway of Sessyne’s esophagus opening up into her stomach. Maria let out a cry as her body was squeezed through the passage into the organ, dropping down into a shallow pool of water, her body sinking down slightly into the flesh at her back. It took several moments to catch her breath, to put the thought of the tightness of the Ichthyian’s throat behind her and allow her body to cool itself again.

Sessyne’s stomach quivered at her presence, the walls contracting some around her, causing her feet to sink in between violet folds. The organ glowed dimly with the same bio-luminescence as the mermaid’s mouth had, the light warming her back even as cool, thick liquid oozed in from some unseen duct, coating the surfaces of the organ as it made its way towards her.

She knew what would happen; she remembered the process from orientation. Sessyne’s stomach would tighten around her as her stomach filled with the bio-conductive liquid that would permeate through her bodysuit and allow the electrical impulses of their nervous systems to interact. Their minds would inhabit each other’s space, existing in-between one another. That was how it was explained to them, and to every student who went through the same orientation. You would gradually slip out of consciousness, just as you would when falling asleep; instead of waking back up in your own head, though, you’d return to consciousness in theirs.

That was how the teacher explained it. That was what the pamphlet that was handed out stated in clean, crisp print, alongside a diagram explaining the Ichthyian digestive system.

The explanation was a pale shadow to the actual experience.

The neural medium was thick like gel, sticking to her as it filled more of the empty space inside Sessyne’s stomach. It smelled cool, and sweet; the scent went quickly to her head, soothing like the drug-soaked wrap doctors would place around the neck of someone suffering from a cold. Maria pushed herself down into the thick liquid, letting it work up over her own belly and chest, letting her hair dip down into it, the scent rising from behind her to fill her nose.

Gradually, the will went out of her limbs; they felt distant, loose, rubbery. It would be disconcerting if not for the feeling of utter calm that slowly crept into her head. It felt comfortable inside Sessyne, more than any bed ever could. A smile formed on her face as Maria turned onto her side, pressing her cheek against the curved wall of the giant’s stomach, coating more of herself in the soothing, mint-like liquid. Her heart and her breathing slowed, and a sigh slipped through her lips. She eased one hand down through the liquid until it met the surface of her companion’s stomach, pushing against it as it contracted more tightly around her. She didn’t know why; if anything, she said to herself as her thoughts started to drift in and out of awareness, it was out of wondering if the giant could feel her in here, could tell that there was something alive and warm curling against some deep, intimate recess of her body.

Her eyes grew heavy, her vision dimming as she drifted downward into sleep. Well, she told herself. She would likely find out, soon enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maria joins with the mermaid Sessyne, sharing her consciousness with her companion; diving down into another soul, though, has as many perils and wonders as the ocean outside...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was absolutely, unbelievably stunned by the response I got to the first part of this story. I really didn’t expect the concept of what I put together to go over so well with all of you.
> 
> Things get a bit stranger in this second part, as Maria dives down into Sessyne’s mind just as much as she dives down into the ocean. We shall soon see if you enjoy this next part as much as you liked the first part… ^^;

Dive deeply into a drop of water, and  
a hundred oceans will flood you  
Look into a mote of dust, and  
a million nameless beings will jump out  
A hundred harvests rest in a germ of barley seed, and  
in the right light, an insect’s wing reflects the sea.  
Why be surprised?  
Deep in the pupil of my eye lie cosmic rays,  
and the center of my heart  
beats with the pulse of the cosmos.

-Mahmud Shabistari

~

Sensation poured like a torrent into Maria's mind as she awoke. The impulses were alien, unfamiliar; pressure pushed in on her skin, slowly mounting as she moved... downward? Deeper? Ribbons of hot and cold crossed her vision, weaving and twisting around another, registering as colors she had no name for, no concept of. Cold liquid poured in and out of her throat, the tissues separating the currents of the ocean from her blood oxygenating one fluid with the help of the other. Her skin, her muscles, her bones were unfamiliar; she wanted to pull away from them, slip out of them. It was only in trying to do so that she realized she had no control over them; she was simply a witness to their movements.

She screamed.

The realization that she could not hear herself screaming only made her scream more.

Something warm wrapped around her. Nothing physical, she realized; her body-- this body-- was still moving forward, arms back to either side of its torso and tail. It was simply a thought, an emotion, the idea of warmth. "Maria," a voice echoed around her, a sound that wasn't a sound and yet resonated through herself, whatever she was at the moment. "You are awake."

Maria struggled to push away her senses, to focus simply on what was happening inside. She pulled back further and further, tuning out sound and temperature and movement, pulling back even from the sensations and awareness of the body she'd slipped into. Sessyne's body, she remembered. She and Sessyne were joined together.

"I... I am..." she said. Or thought. She wasn't quite sure.

The warmth she felt rippled over her, then subsided. "First contact can be startling. Perhaps, I should have warned you about the shock you might experience." Sessyne sounded uncomfortable; no, Maria realized. She could feel the mermaid's emotions and thoughts as easily as she could her own. She wasn't hearing what the mermaid thought; she was experiencing it, herself. "It would have been easier for you, if I had prepared you better for what it would feel like for you."

"No, no. It's okay," Maria said, steadily feeling less overwhelmed by her connection to Sessyne; retreating back away from the mermaid's senses helped some. "It's okay. I don't... I don't think anything could have prepared me for this. It's not really something you can put into words. At least, not words that would mean anything. You can't really describe what it feels like to be in someone else's head. To be... to almost be... someone else.

She gathered herself together, and reached back outwards, away from her own presence inside Sessyne. First she would focus on Sessyne herself, she told herself. Then the world outside. One by one, she allowed the sensations, the presence, of different parts of the mermaid's body to filter into her own mind. The easiest to pick out was her heart-- rather, her hearts, three in total, beating rhythmically one after the other to circulate blood throughout the full length of her hosts' body. Then her gills, pulling oxygen out of suspension in the water, taking over for the mermaid's lungs. Those great sacs were collapsed, kept alive with a minimal amount of blood coursing through them while Sessyne swam.

They were underwater. Little by little, she grew aware of every pull and push of the Ichthyian's muscles, each dip and turn of her tail, the way her fins and webbed hands and every plane of her body acted to orient her in six-directional space. "I can't control how you're moving, can I?" Maria asked, slowing down how quickly she tried to fill the space within Sessyne's being.

"It would be too dangerous to let you that deep into me."

"Too dangerous?"

"The more entangled two consciousnesses become, the more difficult, and the more painful it is, to separate them again." Maria felt the same discomfort she noticed when Sessyne apologized for the shock the human girl felt when she woke up. "One of the first things we learn, before we start to participate in the Project with your kind, is to push back on the human consciousness we are carrying, to keep it from unknowingly becoming too entangled with our own."

The warmth Maria felt had subsided now, replaced with a chill that was barely perceptible, but very much present. Slowly, she pulled away from the sensations she was absorbing from throughout the mermaid's body. They felt foreign again, distinct from herself; that, she told herself, was good. She wanted to remember that, that this was not her body. Part of her wondered if Sessyne could feel her fright as easily as she felt the Ichthyian's emotions. "In other words... if I go too deep into your mind, I might never be able to become myself, again."

"Yes, Maria."

She wasn't sure what to do. If she was at home, and she was frightened, she would curl up in a ball under her blankets, breathing slowly, counting to herself until the fear melted away. There was no breathing here; she had no connection to her own lungs or to those belonging to the giant she was floating inside of. She could not curl into a ball, or manipulate either body in any way. She was more alone than she ever felt, even though she knew she was completely surrounded by Sessyne.

She wanted to cry.

"Maria?"

She pushed back against Sessyne, against the voice and the sound and the still-unfamiliar sensations trying to spill into her own consciousness. "Please," she said, feeling as though she were vibrating. "Please. I just need a little while. Just give me a little while, so I can convince myself not to feel scared."

The presence around her subsided; the world and everything in it pulled away from her. Maria felt like she was floating within her host, just as Sessyne might drift through the ocean as she slept. She pulled herself as far from the mermaid as she could manage, and made everything quiet, until she fell back asleep again.

~

She awoke again, and felt swaddled in... she couldn't quite describe it.

Physically, she felt her body-- their body-- drifting through the water. Sessyne was asleep, she realized. Life surged through the flesh and bones Maria inhabited. She was aware of her own body, nestled deep within Sessyne's, felt energy being coaxed out of her through her nerves, her skin, into the fluid that filled the mermaid's stomach and deeper, deeper into the body that contained her.

It was strange, she realized, to feel yourself, inside of yourself. The border between her own consciousness and that of her host was already thoroughly blurred; it was easy to see how it could disappear entirely. How her own thoughts, flowing like a current through the greater sea of Sessyne's soul, could simply drift apart and sink, becoming simply memories within that larger consciousness.

The span of that abyss, seemingly as endless as the ocean they now swam through, faded from her mind though, overwhelmed by the warmth that had settled around her.

At home, she often settled into bed at night, wrapping her blankets around her like some great shell. The bundled fabric trapped and reflected her body's natural heat back onto herself, relaxing her nerves after another day of people's stares, people's whispers. There, she could tune it all out; there, she could simply focus on that comforting warmth and nothing else.

"Maria?"

Sessyne's voice filtered down through the warmth wrapped around her; no, she realized, her consciousness reaching back out of herself once again. Sessyne's voice, her presence, was what surrounded her. "S... Sessyne?"

The warmth rippled through her being. "Would it be easier, if there were a picture?"

"...Yes."

The darkness melted into hues of indigo and blue, the colors of the depths of Rahabat's ocean. Sessyne's form coalesced into a shadow, and then regained color and form, floating in the water just above herself.

Herself?

She willed her hands into her sight; as they swept into view from below her gaze, she gasped. They were webbed, formed no different from Sessyne's own. Coldness threatened to intrude upon the warmth that enclosed her, her hands shaking in front of her sight. "What... my..."

Sessyne swam closer; they were the same size, Maria realized, and wondered why she should be surprised. These weren't real bodies; what she saw was as intangible as any other dream. They were as big or as small as they wished, could take whatever shape they wished.

 

"You're overwhelmed," Sessyne said; Maria's own language came naturally in this space to the mermaid. "Your mind is still grappling with the fear of losing yourself. That's why you look like one of us." She smiled, and reached out, her hands laying gently on the curves of Maria's cheeks. "Look carefully."

Maria forced her mind to focus, to think about herself. Fleeting glimpses of her own hair floated in and out of her vision; her own hair, still colored the same as it was in a human body. She looked down; her skin and scales were the same colors and patterns as Sessyne, but the body they wrapped around was rounder, fleshier, than her host. The more she focused, the more she could see herself in this alien body. Gradually, the bolt of cold withdrew from her blanketed cocoon, leaving her alone and at peace with Sessyne.

"I feel warm," she finally managed to say, pressing her cheek into the palm of Sessyne's hand. "Is that because of you?"

Sessyne nodded. "I could feel you hurting when I started to fall asleep. The past few hours have been so much for you. There's nothing that can prepare you for the sensation of being pulled, no matter how gently, out of your own body. Different people react in different ways... I'm sorry that the experience was so painful for you."

"You've been very kind to me, so far," Maria said. Sessyne's hand started to slip away from her face; she reached up quickly, maybe too quickly, she realized, and held it back against her. "It's not your fault. I know you didn't mean for it to hurt, or to scare me."

"Nonetheless," Sessyne said, "I was worried for you. You always seem to be in pain. To hurt. It felt wrong to contribute to that pain."

Maria laughed and shook her head, even though the motion of it wasn't real, and neither was the sound. The world inside this dream felt no different from anything else with Sessyne; they could just as easily be awake, and having this conversation. "That's the thing with pain like that. You get used to it, after a while. The shock goes away, and you get used to it."

"You shouldn't have to."

"But you do." Maria pulled back, the world around her dimming for a moment as regret welled up from within her. "You have to, otherwise it hurts too much to get out of bed in the morning."

She laughed quietly and pulled herself back towards Sessyne, until their bodies pressed against one another. Slowly, the mermaid's tail wrapped around her own; arms covered in scales and flesh threaded their way around her chest. Sessyne's hands lay against her back, caressing the scales that ran the length of Maria's spine. "I should be careful," Maria said as she pressed her face against the crook of Sessyne's neck. "The way this is... I might not want to leave."

Sessyne said nothing. "You can tell I'm thinking it, can't you?" Maria said.

"I can."

"If I wanted it," Maria said, "would you keep me?"

"You wouldn't want it. Not really."

Light and color, form and shape, started to slip away. The warmth enveloping Maria started to lull her back to sleep, a more restful slumber than she awoke from. "We'll see how I feel," she said. The shape of their bodies melted away, slipping back into shadow, the separate sensations of their imagined bodies becoming indistinguishable, until only the placid darkness of sleep remained.

~

It was hard to get much of a grasp on the passage of time from inside of Sessyne when she wasn't actively drawing from the mermaid's senses. With no cues of sunrise and sunset, no change in temperature or lighting, day and night blended together into a sort of sameness. The time she spent asleep could have been only minutes, or might have been days.

She awoke and stretched; instead of warming up muscle, she was reaching out for it, for skin to register the water around her, for eyes to see the outside, for Sessyne's consciousness to hear her voice, reassuring and musical as it rippled through her own being. Sure enough, all of it was there, her soul slipping into place more naturally than it had the first time. It felt more like this was her body, and not some too-small room that she couldn't find an exit from.

"Sessyne!"

She called out, reeling at first as the brightness of the outside world poured into her mind. They were closer to the surface than they were earlier; the water felt warmer, and she could see wavering columns of light piercing downwards from the ocean's surface. Solid surface was starting to appear in the distance, surrounded by the teaming silhouettes of the thousands of other species the shared the Ichthyian's watery home. "Sessyne!"

The mermaid's laughter moved through her like a wave. "I'm glad you're awake," Sessyne answered at last. "You seem a little more comfortable; your body is resting more quietly inside me than before. And I can..." There was a sound of satisfaction, the feel of muscles pulling, stretching, testing their own elasticity before snapping back into their natural place. "I can feel you reaching out through me."

Maria wondered if her emotions could cause Sessyne to blush in response, if they were connected that strongly. "That sounds... weird."

"I'm sorry," Sessyne said, laughing a little. "I don't mean for it to sound that way."

"I'm sure you didn't," Maria said. "You can really feel me, though? When I'm trying to feel the outside world?"

"In a sense, yes." The water grew warmer; they were rising closer to the surface as they approached the undersea cliff. The world was filled with more familiar colors now that the light of Rahabat's sun was near enough to illuminate their surroundings. And what colors there were! Fish of every shade and hue fluttered by, more and more often as they approached the reefs at the cliff's edge. "The more you reach out through my nerves, the more the energy of your consciousness flows through me. I can feel the difference between my own presence, and both of our presences, together."

Sessyne smiled; her tail snapped at the water, whipping out its length behind her. "Let's not talk about the world within us right now. There's so much I want to show you!"

The sea rushed past them faster, the reef approaching more quickly. Maria laughed, and thought for a moment and holding on tight to her companion before realizing she didn't have to. In moments, they were coasting over the multi-hued tangle of coral, stretching out from one end of the horizon to the other, and surely further in each direction. More fish of every shape and size than Maria could count swam in and around the tightly clustered branches, darting around and chasing one another through the sea. Speckles of light flit over the sandy surface of the sea bottom and along what glimpses of Sessyne's body she could see through the mermaid's own eyes.

"There's so many down here!" Maria called out. "Can we look closer?"

"A little, yes."

Sessyne eased herself into a valley in the thick growth of coral, threading her way between the twisting, towering stacks without any worry of running into them. The fish came right up to Maria's eyes; she could see every detail and felt like she could touch each scale on their body. Then, though, as quickly as they swam up to her, they swam away again.

"Sessyne," Maria asked as the mermaid climbed out of the valley again and slowly coast over the coral, "what did your species feed on before we came to your world?"

"Most of the other fish, naturally. We would draw the energy out of them completely; the body left behind would sink into the depths once it was out of our body."

"That happened a few times," Maria continued, "when we first came to your world, didn't it? We were afraid of each other, and we would try to attack Ichthyians, and your people would eat and drain us like that..."

"It was a very sad and painful time, Maria," Sessyne said. It was less playful, and more firm, more reassuring. "I hadn't even been born yet. We are both children of a better time for our species."

A curl of warmth wrapped around Maria. "Would you like to see something truly spectacular?" Sessyne said, shifting direction sideways and downward.

"Spectacular?"

"You will see. Watch!"

Sessyne sailed ahead, her tail once more whipping at the ocean water, yet careful not to strike against or disturb the wall of coral she swam over and alongside. Twists of red and pink, yellow and green hurried past them, with darts of brighter colors flashing through their field of vision as the fish around them swam by. Coral gave way to sea bottom, and the line of the cliff that dropped back down into the abyss worked its way back into sight.

Then, Maria saw it.

She wasn't quite sure what she was looking at, at first. It simply seemed to be a shelf covered in coral, further down in the water from the ledge she and Sessyne were swimming over. The closer they came, though, the more she realized she was not looking at the sharp, rocky face of a cliff, but the slowly-swimming mass of one of the largest animals on Rahabat.

"I think your people call them Nessae?" Amusement seemed to flow back towards Maria from Sessyne's mind, an almost ticklish sensation as the feeling of the mermaid's gentle laughter rippled through them. "After a creature they believed lived on the world humans came from?"

If she had lungs, she would have no breath to fill them. She'd seen photos of nessae in textbooks, naturally; they were a favorite of the biologists living in the colony. Gigantic, almost serpentine creatures that did not look terribly dissimilar from the numerous plesiosaurs of ancient Earth, the nessae seemed to drift along the currents that wound their way around the planet. Stretching for hundreds of feet, their long, flat backs supported growths of plants and coral and all manner of sealife-- effectively, floating, roaming oasises in the midst of the plunging depths separating Rahabat's undersea continents.

It was impossible to see them up-close, as they kept to depths greater than humans could reach unaided. Nestled deep inside of Sessyne, though, she felt as though she could reach out and touch it with her own fingers.

"Is it..." Maria started to ask; she never wanted to sound to insistent, even if this was her trip into the ocean. "Is it safe for you to swim closer to it?"

Sessyne was already starting to swim out over the depths, winding her way closer to the giant. "They're filter-feeders; it's perfectly safe for us to approach, though we must keep an eye for any predators that might be following them for an easy meal."

The nessae quickly filled their sights; the slow-moving giant dwarfed Sessyne, the mermaid hardly reaching longer than a third, maybe, of the length of the creature's neck. Clusters of smaller fish rested and circled the bulk of its body, making the back of their carrier as much of a home as the stationary shelf full of coral Maria and Sessyne left behind. "Life is truly," Sessyne said, keeping pace with the giant swimming alongside them, "a remarkable thing. It finds shelter and safety wherever it can, even in the most frightening of places."

Maria let her agreement ripple outward through Sessyne's consciousness as they peeled away from the nessae and went their separate ways.

~

They settled back into the deep, coasting slowly along a deep-water current, hundreds of feet below the surface of Rahabat's ocean. This time, Maria did not withdraw from Sessyne's senses, from her body; instead, she kept herself immersed and took into the strange, dark reality of the abyss. Somewhere, back on the planet that her grandparents called home, there were creatures just as alien-looking as the serpentine and jet-propelled beings that dwelled at these depths. That seemed to be the one parallel between all worlds, no matter where humankind traveled in the galaxy: the deeper in one went into the world, the stranger life became.

"Do you ever wonder," Maria said, her thoughts wandering in the sunless depths. "Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be human?"

There was a pause within Sessyne's consciousness, then her thoughts bubbled back into activity. "Sometimes, yes. I wonder what it would be like to walk among your people, as your kind swims among ours. To know the possibility of traveling to other worlds, other stars."

"Do you think it would be possible to..."

"What is it, Maria?"

Maria sank into a dark as pitch black as the ocean around them, imagining Sessyne's consciousness as a warm ball of light. She raised her hands to it, human hands instead of the webbed limbs of her earlier dream, and brought the ball to her lips, resting them upon that glowing gem. "If it's possible to pull my soul into yours, is it possible to go the other way around?"

She leaned back; there, in front of her, Sessyne emerged from the dark, at first in her natural form, then slowly shifting, her tail splitting into legs as the wing-like sails at her back melted away. "You can't possibly be prepared to carry me inside of you like that. It takes many years of training for us to allow a human consciousness into ours..."

Something tightened in Maria's chest, squeezing at her imagined heart as imagined tears welled from equally-imagined eyes. "I don't want to go back, not alone. I already feel so alone, all the time...your the first person besides my parents and teachers that wanted to talk to me, to spend time with me, that enjoyed having me around, and I..." She breathed deep, her open lips encircling the orb in her hands. She could feel her heart swell at how close that light was, how close it was to sinking into her own, swelling the walls of the aching knot in her chest. "I don't want to feel lonely anymore, Sessyne."

The mermaid's hands reached out, grasping her own, pulling the light back from her lips as she pulled her body closer to Maria. "You are not alone. You're with me, right now. And I will gladly be your friend, Maria."

Maria's hands tightened around the lightly, its heat pouring through her hands and down into her. "Then let me take you with me. You've shown me your world; I want to show you mine."

"You can't take me. That world isn't for me, no more than this world is for you. Your heart can't carry me, not all of me." Sessyne shook her head. "There are too many thoughts, too many memories. A human heart would burst, trying to contain it all."

Droplets of tears drifted from Maria's eyes, rolling along the tops of her cheeks until they drifted away behind her. "It's already bursting from loneliness."

Sessyne nodded and parted Maria's hands, carefully lifting the glowing ball out of her palms. It slowly faded into her own hands, her imagined body retaking Ichthyian form. "You can't take all of it," Sessyne said, her hands reaching back out for Maria. "But I can give you a piece to share. To fill a little of that empty space."

Sessyne's arms wrapped around Maria, cradling the human girl to her chest. The mermaid's eyes seemed as vast and as deep as the ocean they floated in, hiding at some unimaginable depth the light she so desperately wanted to pour into her own heart. They were beings of two entirely different worlds that could touch, but never mix.

Then, though, Sessyne pulled her up towards her until their cheeks brushed, their lips grazing over one another. For a moment, the warmth of Sessyne's breath blew against her skin; Maria's tongue tasted the salt water on the mermaid's lips. Without a second's hesitation, she knew that this was what she wanted to feel.

Maria wrapped her own arms around Sessyne's chest, her palms pressing into her shoulders as she pushed their mouths together, easing her tongue into her companion's mouth. The cool taste of Sessyne's mouth blended with the heat of her own body; she could feel the Ichthyian's body tremble under her hands as she plunged deeper into their kiss. The three-count beat of Sessyne's hearts rippled through her own body as breasts pressed against the mermaid's chest; she sighed softly at the feeling of cool scales laying against the back of her legs, Sessyne's tail threading itself between her limbs in looping curls.

"Don't leave me," she thought, feeling Sessyne's tongue push past her lips. Their kiss could continue endlessly, through whatever they wanted to say; she had so much to say, at that, and so little time to share it with the mermaid. "Take me with you, or come with me. But don't leave me alone..."

She gasped, feeling something hot flow into her chest. Their lips broke from one another for a moment, Maria's eyes catching sight of a warm glow of light flowing like a river between their two bodies. The shock of contact melted away, as did the aching in her chest. Every thought, every memory of her classmates, of all their condescension and sideways looks, seemed to succumb to the warmth, falling out of her and pouring downwards, away from them both.

"Why don't they like you?"

Sessyne's voice echoed throughout her as their mouths pressed back together, the sound of their hearts calling out to one another over that bridge clearer than any speech. Her mind played through her memories as they ran backwards, seeing back months, years, as though she were watching them on a tablet. Or through Sessyne's eyes, she thought.

"Sometimes... people just don't like each other. There isn't a reason. They just... want to hate you, because they can, because... that's what they want to do."

She felt like liquid; she felt like the heat pouring into her from Sessyne was melting her; the mermaid herself felt the same. Was this what she warned about, about losing herself? Maybe it didn't quite matter, anymore. Her hands seemed to sink into Sessyne's skin, their bellies and breasts blending together; she felt as though she were falling into the mermaid, or perhaps that Sessyne was falling into her.

Somehow, she would tell her parents, tell them she was sorry and that she loved them, and she was happier this way. Their daughter was safe and, more important, was happy, a bright light swimming free deep within the soul of her Ichthyian friend. She would never need to curl up under her blankets and cry again, never have to wonder why she couldn't make friends, never worry that she was unhappy anymore. She would tell them, and then plunge back into the sea, to know the wonders of this great, unexplored world in ways no human ever could, no matter how many times they bonded with one of Sessyne's kind.

"Maria."

There was a push back, a sudden rediscovery that she was solid, or at least as solid as an imagined form could be. Their bodies split back into individual forms, their own shapes, holding each other as they floated in the depths. "Maria," Sessyne's voice echoed through her, "You are not me. And I am not you."

"No, Sessyne... please..."

"It's okay."

Maria gasped; when the mermaid spoke, something reverberated within her own heart; a warmth, wrapped like a cocoon around her being, around that brightly shining core of who she was, resonated with the mermaid's words. "You must go back to your world, in time, and I, to mine. But you can take part of me with you, back to your world, so that when you feel pain, you don't have to be alone."

Sessyne took Maria's hands and laid them to the center of her chest. The mermaid's hearts beat in time with her own; between the two of them, the faintest, glistening string stretched through the water and through them, joining them, light to light. "A piece of me will always be with you," she said, beads of light sliding like drops of dew along the thread between them. "And a piece of you, with me."

Maria closed her eyes and smiled. "I'll cherish it, forever. Thank you."

The sea faded, as did their bodies, until what was left were two lights joined by thread, drifting into the dark together.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A frightening encounter both draws Maria and Sessyne tightly together, and completely apart; Maria's return to the human world above the ocean leaves her wondering what will become of her relationship with Sessyne now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Each part of this story just seems to keep growing, and growing... this does, however, bring us closer to the end of our story. The next part will tie up any remaining loose ends, though maybe not all of them. 
> 
> Again, I want to thank everyone who has messaged me, sent kudos, and otherwise shared with me their love for this story. The more I write about Maria and Sessyne, the more I love them. I hope the same will be true for all of you as you read onwards.

 

_"Come you lost atoms, to your Center draw_  
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw;  
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide  
Return and back into your Sun subside."

-Farid al-Din 'Attar

~

 

Maria drifted through the dark of her sleep within Sessyne, detached from the world outside. It was easier, this way, she'd found after a few of the mermaid's sleep cycles. The experience of seeing the world through Sessyne's eyes was still so new to her that it was simply easier to detach from her senses and simply drift within the Ichthyian's mind, just as Sessyne drifted through the open ocean. It was peaceful, generally, more quiet than any sleep she had ever enjoyed.

However, being alone with her own mind made it easier for her dreams to press into her unconsciousness and pull her out of that peace.

She sat up with a jolt, sitting in the middle of her classroom, back at the colony. Her classmates filled the room, going back as far as she could see. Their faces kept changing as she looked in different directions; first, they would look like one person, and then, with the slightest turn of her head, they'd have someone else's face. The classroom itself was lost in fog, its crisp, cream-colored walls, greenery, and glass dome visible only as abstract blocks of color at the edges of her vision.

"What is with you?" the murmuring voices said to her, slowly pressing in around her. "Why are you being so weird?"

"I'm... I'm not being weird!" Maria shouted out, pressing back into her seat. It was then that she realized she was naked, her bottom of her seat cold against her thighs. She gasped and crossed her legs, folding her arms over her breasts. "Where are my clothes? Go away!"

They only pressed in more, though, packing together, starting to pile on top of each other like stones in an ancient wall. "Look at you," they called out again, discordant with one another. "What even are you? What are you doing?"

"What?"

Maria looked down at herself, and gasped. Violet and blue scales had started to grow on her arms, fibers of paper-thin flesh growing between her fingers. Her thighs and shins stuck together, slowly sheathing themselves in the same scales that were covering the backs of her arms. Her insides twisted around, provoking a pained scream, her body writhing around until it fell to the floor. "Stop staring, please!" Her hands clutched for the nearest of them, only to find their bodies as intangible as smoke. "Help me! Get me to the water, please!"

No one moved, though, except to keep piling up on each other, until the wall of her classmates rose up to the ceiling. Maria curled her tail around herself, trembling as her skin started to stretch, her bones straining and growing within her. She was an Ichthyian, now-- she had their shape, and soon, their size. "Please, help me! You have to get me to the water!"

Instead, the wall started to collapse, falling in on her, the twisting, tumbling forms of her classmates dropping down to cover and surround her. Maria thrust out her limbs, her quickly growing tail, the sail-like appendages growing out her back struggling to break through the pile. "Please!" she choked out, her lungs hot as they struggled to pull oxygen from the air. "Please, stop staring and help me!"

No one did, and the world became a crush of darkness.

  


~

  
  
Maria burst out of her sleep to a violent burst of light and sound, a cacophony of impulses that pound upon her from all directions. Muscles strained and wrenched, and a hot feeling surged through her flesh. Maria cried out, each bolt of pain driven like metal rods through her body. She was being attacked, she realized; she was dying.  
  
No, not her, she realized. Not her body. Sessyne's. Their body. The body they were sharing.  
  
"Sessyne!" she called out, struggling to keep her own head, her own consciousness, above the torrent of feeling, of pain, bombarding her like the cascading downpour of a waterfall. The sound of her own consciousness, of her own voice, burst through the soul surrounding her like thunder and lightning through the sky. "Sessyne!"  
  
The closer she drew to the mermaid's mind, the more what was happening came into focus. One of the many predators that populated the deep, a great, torpedo-shaped monster with rings of jagged teeth filling its mouth, pursued them through the open waters. It would lunge forward, grabbing hold of the Ichthyian's flesh for seconds, precious seconds, spilling ribbons of violet blood into the sea before Sessyne's tail beat the monster away long enough for her to put distance between it and them. Every cry of pain Sessyne made sliced through her like hot knives; each break of the monster's fangs through the mermaid's flesh felt as though it were splitting through her own body.  
  
"I'm sorry!" Sessyne called out, tail whipping through the water to propel them upwards. "It came up on us while we were sleeping; I didn't sense it until it was nearly on us!"  
  
"It's not your fault!" Maria looked outward, into the ocean. Little by little, the rays of Rahabat's sun grew closer, the waters growing brighter, lighter as they raced towards the surface. Below them, though, the monster was still in pursuit and gaining on them, quickly. "How far are we?"  
  
"Not far, not much further..." Sessyne's gills pulled water through them, trying to draw what oxygen they could from the ocean as the liquid poured over their surfaces. "The door going into the pool will shut behind us, we'll be safe once we're inside..."  
  
She was slowing, though; Maria could feel the mermaid's muscles straining to keep up her pace. Such massive creatures were simply not built to move this quickly for this long. Sessyne could fight the monster, if she were alone; could probably rip its body apart with the teeth that had frightened her so much when they first met. It was too dangerous, though, with her passenger inside. The concentration it took to keep their souls separated wore on the Ichthyian's strength too much, and it was simply too dangerous to get too close to the monster and risk the body of the passenger riding in the mermaid's belly.  
  
No, Maria thought, steeling herself. She would not be responsible for killing them both.  
  
"Sessyne, please!" she called out again, feeling the leviathan racing closer; she could almost feel its jaws opening wide, imagining the horrible sight in her mind as it closed in on them. "Please, let me in completely! We can make it back to the colony if we work together!"  
  
"No! That's too dangerous! I might lose you!"  
  
"We'll both die anyway if it catches us!"  
  
She felt like a fish, swimming up stream; she'd reached a point within Sessyne where the current was too strong, where it pushed back on her with all its might. This was the inner-most barrier separating Sessyne from herself; beyond here, they would be one with the strength of two, every fiber of their beings, every drop of energy in them poured into reaching the human colony floating on the ocean's surface. It was the only chance they had, Maria thought. Risking being lost inside Sessyne forever, or risk being torn to ribbons by a hungry beast.  
  
It was no longer about loneliness, about her own selfish wishes. It was the desperation of hunted prey. It was the desire to protect, and be protected.  
  
"Please," Maria pleaded. "We can do this. Together."  
  
Slowly, the push of Sessyne's mind ebbed away; the current reversed, and she found herself pulled in deeper. Memory and emotion, of every creature the Ichthyian ever met, of every soul she'd bonded with, every experience and hope and fear she'd ever had rushed into Maria's mind all at once. There were so many faces, so many sounds, she couldn't catch them all; they simply raced past, receding behind her as light rushed in, bathing her in warmth and a luminescence that blotted out all else.  
  
And then...  
  
And then...  
  
And then there was no Maria, and no Sessyne. There was something entirely other. Pain flooded through her, but so did unfathomable strength. She was massive; her tail could crush in a single blow the ships that humans used to sail across the surface of this world. She breathed water as easily as they breathed air; her hearts pulsed in rhythm with one another. Save for where it had been torn, her skin felt tough, able to withstand the crushing pressures of the deep.  
  
Their memories swirled around one another, losing their distinction; she saw one form as the other, and vice-versa. Children staring, expectant of her, expecting her to back down, shut up. How they whispered, muttered amongst themselves. What was she doing, asking him out? Why did she bother trying to answer? She hasn't got the answer; she's too plain for him. She's so out of shape, she can't keep up. She's so slow. She always just seems lost, dazed. Why is she even here? Why does she even bother?  
  
And then her other side, euphoric, singing of thousands of species she didn't know the names of, racing around and past her like petals in the wind. Pods of Ichthyians tumbling around one another, their sail-like wings fluttering against one another. Their homes nested in multi-hued caverns of coral, nested beds of sand, bodies curled against one another. Her brothers, her sisters, were mating amongst other pods already. Soon enough, she would as well. weaving those great webs of love across the ocean. She would mate, and take a lover from amongst her mates. They would start a pod all their own, all of them together, and settle an uncharted corner of their watery world. This was her purpose, to know boundless seas, to weave the net of their collective being tighter, until it encircled the world. A light illuminating the dark, making known and tangible the unseen around them.  
  
The other half, the human half, paled by comparison, seemed so small when set beside all that came before, overflowing with love, and all that lie ahead. So feeble and frightened. But no longer; they were one, and would sing as one, and there would be no need to be sad like that, anymore.  
  
First, though. First she must survive! Her gills opened, her tail cracking like a whip behind her and left a quickly-fading vortex of churned waters in her wake as she lunged with renewed vigor for the ocean's surface. Let the monster pursue her, if it dared. It would have to take every drop of herself before she gave up.

~

Then, as quickly as it had first surrounded her, there was light again, slowly fading and withdrawing into the corners of her vision.

Her mind stumbled around, grasping for thoughts, names, anything. Her name! Maria and Sessyne both floated in front of her; at one moment, one name, and another the other would come into focus. Who was she again? She sunk into herself, listening; a single heartbeat, instead of three, with lungs steadily filling and emptying with air. Her body divided below the hip bones, and air flowed down through her mouth and nose, nostrils flaring open each time they pulled in fresh oxygen.  
  
She was human. Maria, she told herself. My name is Maria.  
  
The light faded further, revealing the room around her. She was in a room, a room inside the colony. Crisp, pastel colored walls formed the borders; there were people moving around, adults. One shorter, a sheet of white fluttering around their body as they moved around. Two other figures stood around the first, leaning towards them and nodding. These two stood very close to each other, and looked several times in her direction.  
  
Mama and Papa. The third was Dr. Patasaya; the name floated up from some corner of her memories. The colony's chief physician; it made sense that she would be called in after...  
  
She blinked, her vision clearing for the first time. What had happened?  
  
She tried to call out, looking to get the attention of anyone nearby, but found her words muffled by the mask gently blowing fresh air over her nose and mouth. Her brain commanded her body to sit upright, but her muscles only succeeded in flopping uselessly against the bed.  
  
"...miraculous that we managed to find her conscious..." The doctor's head turned at the sound her body twisting around on top of the bed. "Oh, god, she's awake!"  
  
The three of them hurried to her bedside, Dr. Patasaya laying her hand gently against Maria's shoulder. "Ms. Gutieres? You're alright. You're in the E Deck Medical Ward. Can you hear me?"  
  
Maria drew deep breaths from her mask and nodded, letting her body settle back down against the hospital bed. The doctor carefully lifted the fitted mask away; Maria gasped, drawing a deeper breath than what she could pull from the respirator, turning her head to look towards the three adults standing over her. "Mama...? Papa...?"  
  
Her parents both breathed a sigh of relief. "We were so scared..." her mother said, and leaned down to kiss her daughter's forehead.  
  
"I don't understand..." Maria started, her eyes moving between the three of them. "What happened? Everything feels... feels so wrong..."  
  
"That's to be expected. You went much deeper into the consciousness of your Ichthyian host than is normally allowed." The doctor closed her eyes, leaning lightly against the bank of computer monitors sitting beside the bed, each displaying her patient's vitals. "It's honestly a surprise you're as lucid as you are right now."  
  
"My..." Maria felt herself sink back into a fog, memories and thoughts stirring around sluggishly in her head as she tried to remember what happened. Everything was a rush of color and motion, of light and heat and cold. Then, something warm and light bubbled up from her memories; the impression of an embrace, warm and enveloping like a blanket. "Sessyne!" she said, and tried to sit bolt upright; instead, her body started to topple over halfway through the movement, and it was only the hands of the doctor and her father that kept her from rolling out of the bed.  
  
"You've got to be careful!" Her father said, gently setting her upright again. "Dr. Patasaya said your muscles are still weak from being inside the mermaid so long."  
  
"She was hurt! I... we... we were being attacked, by a sea monster, and she was..." Maria's head ached, her brow furrowing as she closed her eyes tightly at the sudden throb of pain in her skull. "There was blood, and I..."  
  
"I assure you, everything is alright." The doctor nodded without speaking at her parents, who nodded back in return, again, without saying a word. "Sessyne is being treated in the pool room by a specialist familiar with her physiology. You'll both be okay, but you both need to rest."  
  
"I just want to see her! I need to... I want to know she's okay!"  
  
"She is okay. You both survived a very dangerous situation, dangerous in a number of different ways." Patasaya sighed, adjusting a few dials on the equipment by Maria's bedside. "It's very important for the moment that neither of you see the other while your bodies and psyches recover from the trauma they've endured."  
  
"I haven't been traumatized!"  
  
"In the clinical and psychological sense, though, you have." The doctor took a seat beside Maria; as high as the bed was lifted and as short as the young specialist was, Patasaya was nearly at eye level with her. "You both nearly died; on top of that, the division between your two psyches was almost completely lost. Any longer within Sessyne at that depth, and there might not have been any of you inside of your body when she pushed you out."  
  
Maria settled onto the bed, turning her face away from the doctor, her parents, towards the window looking out on the calm ocean surrounding the colony. Something in her ached, felt cut apart; she knew exactly what it was, and could feel the invisible, golden thread still binding her to the mermaid, stretched tight from the distance separating them and the weakness within their own minds and bodies.  
  
"You need to rest, Maria." Patasaya stood back up, resting a hand gently on her shoulder. "I've added a medication to your IV that should help you through the aches and pains as you re-adapt to your own body." The doctor turned from and her and looked to her parents. "We'll keep her overnight for observation, and should be able to release her back home tomorrow afternoon."  
  
"Are you still sure about what you said earlier? About reintroducing her back to school the day after that?" Maria's father looked at her for a moment, then turned back to the doctor. "She seems upset..."  
  
"I've contacted the school counselor to keep an eye on her, to make sure she re-acclimates to her routine. It's important, though, that we reintroduce her to her normal surroundings with as little hesitation as we can." The doctor, too, looked concerned; it was hard to tell, though, as she mostly kept her back to Maria. "There's a very severe risk of psychological contamination, and I want to be sure what got pulled out of that merged consciousness is entirely Maria."  
  
Of course it's only me in here, Maria thought to herself. Tears started to well in her eyes; she pressed her face against her pillow, blotting them out before anyone could see. I wouldn't be so lonely if Sessyne were in here, with me.

 

~

 

She struggled to sleep that night.

It was strange, she thought, that laying out exposed to air, and not water, felt strange to her. It was simply the lingering sensory memory of swimming at the depth Sessyne lived at, the doctor told her. It was entirely normal for it to take time to readjust to an environment suited for humans and not Ichthyians.  
  
Maria sighed at Patasaya's reassurance, though. It wasn't just that she felt used to sleeping underwater. It was that sleeping in open air felt alien and uncomfortable; the contact of the thinner, gaseous fluid on her skin was disconcerting. She wasn't sure how long it took the colony's science team to coax Sessyne's body into releasing her, but it felt as though she were merged with her Ichthyian friend forever.  
  
If only, she thought to herself, and pressed her cheek against the hospital bed pillow. It sounded, from what fragments she had heard, that separating the two of them was difficult; maybe she resisted. She certainly hated the separation now, and wanted nothing more than to go back to Sessyne. She was comfortable within her; she felt at home, felt more at ease within the expanse of her soul than she had in years.  
  
"Maria?"  
  
Maria's eyes open wide; at least, she thought they did. She still felt so detached from herself, so unaccustomed to her limbs that she wasn't really sure if they were really responding the way they should. What she was sure of, though, was the echo of the Ichthyian's voice within her mind. "Sessyne?" she called out, barely able to contain the upswell of emotion in her heart. "Sessyne, is that... is that really you?"  
  
The warmth she remembered when she shared Sessyne's body poured back into her, flowing back into her heart and spreading slowly through her body like ink in a glass of water. The fine thread that connected them was invisible, but she could feel its pull, its presence wrapped around her core, whenever the mermaid spoke. "Sessyne, please tell me that it's really you!"  
  
"It is. That you can be sure of."  
  
She relaxed; her limbs stretched out under the blanket covering her, her head sinking down into her pillow. She felt warm; she felt tears running over her cheeks and down the sides of her face. "I've missed you so much... Please... please tell me you're alright... I've been so scared for you since I woke up."  
  
The hospital room melted away, replaced by the cool, rippling blue of the ocean. Sessyne's form solidified out of shapes in the darkness, her arms wrapping around Maria and holding her close to her chest. Maria looked over the Ichthyian's shoulder and could see the jagged scars, still pink and raw, crossing one another on Sessyne's back and tail. The paper-thin flesh of her tail was badly torn, pieces of it fluttering like streamers in the water. "It looks so painful," Maria said, her voice hushed.  
  
Sessyne's hand reached up, stroking the back of Maria's head. "It hurts, but I'm being cared for. The people of your colony are seeing to it that my wounds heal, and that I'll be strong enough to return to open water." She smiled down at Maria, the mass of her hair floating around her head like a cloud. "You have no need to worry about me. Worry for yourself. We must both recover from what we went through, if we are to see one another again."  
  
"But I miss you so much! It's hurting me to be apart from you!" Maria could feel her eyes tearing up again; she wondered if her real eyes were crying, just as they were within her mind, in this vision. "Is it because of what we did? How deep I went? Sessyne, if that's what I did to myself then I never want to be apart from you, ever again!"  
  
"There will be time for that, later. We both need to heal; my body, and your mind." Sessyne started to fade, dissolving back into the darkness she had appeared from. Maria panicked, reaching out for her fading form, her hands grabbing at nothing more than empty space. "You will know when you are ready. You will know it inside."  
  
"Sessyne, wait!"  
  
But then, there was nothing but the dark, and then the cool colors of the hospital room. Maria turned back onto her side, choking back a quiet sob before pulling her blanket tightly around herself.  


 

~

She went home the next day.

  
Patasaya performed a thorough physical that morning, checking every limb, every joint, every imaginable fluid and balance within her body before assuring her parents that she was in good physical health. A private tram car was arranged to transport her and her parents back to their home on the other side of the colony; immediate exposure to all the noise, all the busyness of the colony would be too overwhelming. Even her parents mostly kept quiet, waiting until they were safely home before trying to have a conversation. They simply sat, each to either side of her, one of their hands grasping each of hers gently in reassurance that she was, in fact, there.  
  
She didn't need the reminder, she thought to herself, but kept her protest silent. They only wanted to comfort her, after all. They wanted their daughter to know that they were sympathetic to the trauma she underwent, even if they couldn't understand what she went through. It was better that way, she thought to herself. They would assume the trauma had been the leviathan that attacked her; the beast was frightening, but hardly half of the pain she felt.  
  
Once home, her father sat with her at the breakfast table, her mother lighting a stove in the kitchenette to prepare fresh eggs she'd bought from the colony farm for Maria's return. "Did you get to see much?" her father asked, a gentle smile on his face as he settled down beside her. "I remember my bonding experience, when I was a little boy," he said, indicating with his hand how short he had been compared to his present height. The thought of her father being shorter than herself at her age cracked a smile on Maria's face; her hands played with the juice glass in front of her, carefully tilting it back and forth. "I remember my host... I think her name was... it was Tethytha, that's right. It was very exciting to bond with her, to dive into the ocean and see it through her eyes. At the time, I wished she could have showed me more, but there's only so much a person can see in two days time."  
  
He laughed for a moment, waiting for her to say something in reply. When she offered nothing, he sighed, but kept his smile. "For a while, I thought about going into marine biology, just to keep having that relationship. I might even have been able to continue working with Tethytha, if the Project team thought our compatibility with one another was good enough."  
  
Maria looked up from her juice glass. "You became an engineer, though. What... what changed?"  
  
"I realized I didn't have the interest I thought I did in biology," Her father laughed again, resting his elbows on the table, his chin seated on the backs of his fingers. "Organic chemistry went a bit over my head; machinery just made a bit more sense to me."  
  
Maria's mother joined them at the table, setting a plate of eggs, with cheese and onion, in front of each of the three of them. Her father nodded and headed over to the counter, pulling a pair of coffee cups out of the cabinet before summoning the brewer from its mounting in the wall. "Did you ever see her again? Tethytha, I mean... do you ever miss her, sometimes?"  
  
Her father flashed a wide smile back at her. "A human heart is much smaller than an Ichthyian's. I've only got room enough for your mother in mine, I'm afraid."  
  
Her mother chuckled and rolled her eyes, pouring juice for herself from the pitcher that still sat on the table. "Didn't she end up working in engineering herself, actually?" She asked, looking towards her husband. "I remember you saying she was involved in some of the heavy lifting for an undersea mineral rig, a year or two back."  
  
"Ah! How could I have forgotten?" Her father returned to the table, setting a cup of coffee and cream in front of Maria's mother before taking his own seat to Maria's other side. The smell of roasted coffee beans, sharp and strong, laced with the sweetness of cream and sugar, hung in the air over the table. "She did, in fact; it was sweet catching back up to her. She's our liaison, actually, for her pod regarding any undersea projects on that chunk of the ocean floor. They made the agreement a few years back, so I do get to see her now and again."  
  
"You have to realize, though, that what happened with you the past few days was much more extraordinary than anything most of the people involved in the Project ever experience." Maria's mother turned back to her, stroking a hand over her daughter's hair. The sensation felt the same as Sessyne's caress; carried with it the same sense of comfort, of tenderness. "None of us can really compare what we felt, when we participated, with what you felt. No one has ever gone that deep, under such dangerous circumstances, and come back. What you did, darling, is outside of any anything ordinary. I can promise you that; unfortunately, that means that very few people here can really explain what happens next."  
  
Maria prodded the eggs on her plate with her fork, biting her lip as she dug the tines idly into the fluffy mix of egg, onion, and cheese. "The only thing I feel like I know for sure is that I miss her. I miss being with her; I miss being -within- her. I... I don't know how else to put it into words. I really don't know how."  
  
Maria's mother looked up at her husband, the two of them exchanging a glance in silence, one that Maria was sure said so much without ever speaking. Was that the sort of bond she had with Sessyne? She blushed at the thought that the thread joining them was a love like that. "We'll talk about it tonight; Dr. Patasaya wanted you to return to school today, and wanted you to sit down with the school counselor."  
  
Her father shook his head. "I still don't know if it's such a good idea to send her back so quickly..."  
  
"I'll be okay," Maria said, taking a deep breath. "I'm okay. Just kind of... lonely, that's all." Which isn't anything new, really she thought, but left unsaid. "I promise, I'll be okay."  
  
Her father sighed and took a long sip of his coffee before looking back at her, summoning the best smile he could manage. "If you promise, then."  


 

~

 

The colony's school occupied the upper level of one of the decks that extended out from the anchoring pylon to float over the water. This was done, Maria remembered from a history class years ago, to create an environment that, while protected from the powerful storms that at times traveled across Rahabat's ocean, provided the feeling of openness and exposure to sunlight that encourage optimal health for children growing up on the alien world. Additionally, each glass-domed classroom was ringed in sloped planter beds filled with short trees, flowers, and other plant life whose seeds were imported from the distant Earth.  
  
The details of what all of this did was muddled under a dozen other subjects that she had studied over numerous years of school. What it all added up to, though, was that her classroom was more of a semi-outdoor amphitheater than the schools that she was told still existed, back on their homeworld.  
  
As it often was, the room was a-buzz in the noise of dozens of teenagers chattering with one another. And as she usually did, she made her way from the door and down into the tiered levels of the room, searching for an open seat.  
  
What broke from normal, though, was that the room slowly grew silent as she entered. Conversation died away, and one by one, the gazes of her classmates fell on her. Maria bristled, walking faster until she reached an open seat, where she withdrew her tablet from within and opened its note-taking application. Now you all decide to notice me? she thought to herself, feeling her heart tighten inside of her chest. What was the big deal, anyway?  
  
"Hey. Gutieres."  
  
Maria looked up, fingers still posed over her tablet, interupted in mid-gesture. One of the other girls in the class, a black-haired girl whose lashes made a frame just as dark around her eyes, sat half-turned in her seat on the next level down, looking up at her. "I heard you dug down real deep into your host."  
  
"I don't really want to talk about it, right now." Maria said, and looked back down at her tablet. What were they studying the week before? World literature, her notes reminded her, poetry in particular. Names from different ages, lines of poetry detailing love, passionate love, romantic love and love of one's fellow; sensuous and divine love, scrolled past on the display; still others slid past her fingertips. The name Blake stopped under her thumb when the girl in front of her spoke again.  
  
"I don't care. I want to know. Were you wanting to, like, be a mermaid or something?"  
  
"It's none of your business what I wanted." Maria frowned at her classmate before looking back to her notes, only to have the tablet pulled out of her hands by the dark-haired girl. Maria lunged forward, groping for the device as the other girl held it at arm's length away from her. "What the hell, Cate? Give that back!"  
  
"If you want it back then you need to fess up." Cate stood up, leaning back away from Maria's hands each time she stretched out to retake her tablet. "C'mon, be honest. You're really that weird that you'd kill yourself just to swim around in the ocean all day?"  
  
"Shut up!"  
  
"I heard from one of my mom's friends at work that you didn't want to come out." Cate looked to the other children in the room, who were starting to get up from their seats and surround the quickly-growing fight. One, Maria noticed, was already holding up their tablet to video the outburst. "I heard," Cate continued, "I heard that when the medical team climbed up into the Ichthyian's stomach to pull you out, that you started screaming and kicking at them until they sedated you..."  
  
"Shut up!" Maria snapped and threw herself forward, sending the both of them falling over the backs of the seats in the row below Cate's. The two tumbled over one another, hitting the floor of that tier; Maria's tablet made a sharp crack against the floor; she grunted as she rolled into the backs of the seats on the next row, while Cate rolled onto her side, clutching her head. "Whatever I did, it's none of your damn business!"  
  
Maria pulled herself back to her feet, leaning on the seats bolted into the amphitheater's descending tiers for support. Her side ached, and was probably bruised. The stares of her classmates, dumbfounded and shocked, all focused on her. The attention was alien; no one noticed her before. The thought of all those eyes, all those thoughts, all concentrated on her, was overwhelming, frightening; it felt as unfamiliar as the muscles and organs with Sessyne's body did, when they bonded.  
  
And those became as much mine as hers, she reminded herself. Her back straightened out; her side ached where it had hit the floor, and she ignored it. She pulled at the thread sewn into her heart; not hard, just enough. She smiled when it pulled back, assuring her of Sessyne's presence. She was there to support her, to be her strength, just as she was for the Ichthyian.  
  
She was not alone.  
  
"What are you all staring at?" she said, her voice ringing across the room, rebounding off the smooth surface of the glass dome above them as a fainter echo. The crowd circling her murmured to themselves, their faces looking to one another, unsure what to make of her question. "What? What did you expect? That I'd just pull into myself like a turtle and hide?"  
  
It wasn't even a question; no one answered, because they all already knew the answer: of course it was what they expected. It was all she ever did. If she spoke up in class, if she raised her voice to anyone, if she ever did anything more than fade into the background, it was frowned upon. She wasn't pretty, and she wasn't smart; there was nothing extraordinary about her, and so none of them cared. She was ordinary; that was the consensus, and thus not worth their time.  
  
Well, she was hardly that, anymore. There was something hot and golden and alive inside of her; she'd dove to depths that would crush their bones in an instant, swam alongside one of the gentle giants of the deep. She'd outrun a leviathan and its vicious fangs-- she hadn't simply traveled with a Ichthyian, she had filled their muscle, their bone, she had woven and threaded herself into the very fiber of their being. That strength, that majesty, the power and grace of a creature that could fill this room: she had been that; in a sense, she still was, even if it was wrapped up in the flesh and blood of a teenage human girl.  
  
What could they possibly say to that?  
  
They wouldn't have a chance. The teacher entered then, spotting in an instant Cate still holding her head as she pulled herself up into a seat, and Maria staring down the remainder of the class, expecting a response that wasn't coming. "Everyone, everyone! To your seats!" he said, sweeping his arms to dismiss the children back across the room. "Teri-Lou, help Cate to the nurse's office down the hall. Maria!" He puffed, finally reaching the amphitheater tier that she stood at. "Maria. What's the meaning of this?"  
  
Maria felt the muscles in her back loosen; she brushed her now-tussled hair out of her face as she turned to the startled teacher. "I'm sorry. Cate picked a fight with me. So I fought her back."  
  
"Well, then, you have an appointment with the counselor anyway, so that's one more thing you can discuss with her." With one hand on his chest and the other pointing back towards the door, he nodded for her to leave the room. "Please head to the counselor's office now, young lady."

 

~

Maria looked up from her homework at the sound of her mother knocking on the door; a moment later, the door slid open, her mother standing in the doorway for just a moment before stepping inside, pulling the door closed behind her. "I heard you had something of an interesting day back to school."

Maria bit her lip, pressing the sleep button on the tablet before laying it, screen down, on the comforter. "I guess it depends on who you heard it from."  
  
"From a couple of people. Dr. Greene, your counselor. Mr. Shannon. Professor Bereth." Her mother took a seat on her bed, half turned towards Maria, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The room was dark, lit only by a lamp sitting on a nightstand behind the two of them, and the reflection of one of Rahabat's two moons on the ocean, shining up through the bedroom window. Her mother sighed as Maria sat herself up. "Did you really punch the professor's daughter, Maria?"  
  
"I did," Maria said, her voice quite, but present. "She made me angry. She stole my tablet, and she..." She breathed in, steadying herself, feeling for the thread of warmth wrapped around her heart. It only pulled back very gently in response; she must be asleep, Maria reminded herself, asleep and trying to heal. She smiled, letting the warmth of her own heart flow towards Sessyne. She yawned as her strength trickled out of her, a hint of blush on her face. "Sorry... I was just... just lost in thought."  
  
"It's alright, darling. I know you had a very busy day." Her mother nodded slowly. "Why did you punch Cate in class today, Maria?"  
  
"She made me angry. She said I..." Something of Sessyne rippled back up the thread, soothing her heart as it started to tighten at the thought of Cate's words. "She said I didn't want to be taken out of Sessyne. That I... That I wanted to die, and stay inside her forever."  
  
"Did you want to stay with her, Maria?"  
  
Maria nodded slowly, letting each wave ripple outward from her heart, reaching to every corner of her body. "I did. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay with her, and tell you and Papa that I would miss you both, but that I was happy staying with Sessyne, because I didn't feel so alone anymore."  
  
She sat up straight, her head almost level with her mother's, looking the woman who carried her into this world in the eyes. "And I was so scared when they separated me from her. I thought I would lose what tied us together. But I can still feel it, Mama. I feel it right now, like a thread running between us, holding us together. I can still feel what she feels, and she can feel me. Wherever we are, we can be there for one another. I can feel her sleeping right now and I'm trying to comfort her because I know she still hurts from where the Leviathan attacked us and..."  
  
The words just seemed to spill out of her, as though her mind had sprung a leak, allowing everything to pour out, all at once. Her hand laid against her chest, head bowed as she watched her own breathing, feeling her lungs fill and empty with air. "I don't understand what I did, Mama. How we ended up intertwined like this, this much. But I feel like... like something changed. I don't feel so scared of everyone, anymore. I don't feel afraid to speak up, I don't feel so alone when they're all staring at me and thinking, 'why is she talking', because thre is someone with me. That's why I hit Cate. She made me mad, and I wanted her to stop. So I made her stop."  
  
She let the words melt away into the room, and felt relaxed. When had she ever been so forward, so frank? It used to be easier just to keep quiet and say everything was okay, whether it was or wasn't. Then, carefully, her mother's arms wrapped around her, leaning Maria towards her, resting her daughter's cheek against her collarbone.  
  
"I'm not proud that you hit your classmate," she said, her voice soft in Maria's ear. "But I'm proud that you stood up to her when she upset you. Whatever you and Sessyne went through, I feel like it did something very good inside of you."  
  
Her's mother's hand came to rest against her own, enveloping Maria's like a shell. "We meet people, Maria, who transform us like that. They have a very profound part to play in our lives. There are so many kinds of love, my darling; the love I have for you, the love your father has for you. The love that two friends share; romantic love between people bound together to spend their lives with one another. And many, many more besides that."  
  
"Love is what is tying you and Sessyne together. I do not know what sort of love it is; maybe neither of you know exactly what it's nature is, just yet." Her mother smiled, sitting Maria up straight as she rose up from her seat on the bed. "But that is what love does. It gives you strength, and makes the world feel less lonely. And I am overjoyed knowing that you have finally found love, out there in the world."  
  
Her mother started to leave the room, sliding the door open, letting light in from the hallway outside. "Mama," Maria asked. The thought of it made her warm, comfortable, but uncertain. Was she in love? She'd only known Sessyne for days, even if it felt like they'd spent a lifetime together. "What am I supposed to do?"  
  
Her mother smiled back towards her before slowly sliding the door shut. "That is for the two of you to find out," she said. "But I will be here for you, and so will your Papa, if you need help along the way. Good night, darling."  
  
Maria waited for the door to close before falling back onto her bed, turning until she stared out the window to the star-filled sky above them and gentle waves coursing by below. What did she feel, exactly, about Sessyne? It was undoubtedly love, but she didn't know what to do with it. Were they friends? They were more intimate than that, but the thought of being the lover, the companion of a being that was so unlike her, who lived in a completely different world from her, was unimaginable.  
  
Warmth radiated back from her heart, though, reminding her of Sessyne's presence. She set her homework aside on her nightstand, pulling up her bed sheet over herself. It would be okay, she promised herself, as she drifted asleep. They would sort it out. There was all the time in the world for them to take that journey, together.  
  
Together. The thought lingered on Maria's mind. She liked the sound of that.

 

_~_

_To be concluded..._


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maria comes to both conclusions and beginnings with Sessyne as she opens up to the fact that she is not alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been a bit of a rough and halting ride and points, but we have finally arrived at the conclusion of our story. Read on to learn what becomes of Maria and Sessyne; there will be more notes and acknowledgements at the end of this chapter.

 

  
_"God is the Light of the heavens and the earth,_  
 _the parable of His light is, as it were,_  
 _that of a niche containing a lamp;_  
 _the lamp is in glass, the glass like a radiant star:_  
 _lit from a blessed tree,_  
 _an olive-tree that is neither of the east nor of the west,_  
 _the oil whereof would well-nigh give light even though fire had not touched it;_  
 _light upon light!_  
 _God guides unto His light him that wills;_  
 _and God propounds parables unto men,_  
 _since God has full knowledge of all things."_

_The Quran, Surah an-Nur, verse 35_  
as translated and interpreted by Muhammad Asad

~

  
"You should be paying attention in class, Maria, and not talking to me so much!"  
  
Maria blinked, startled at the reminder that there was a world outside of the conversation going back and forth in her head between herself and Sessyne. The room around her came back into focus, as did the sound of her teacher explaining with more enthusiasm than his students cared for the geological processes involved in transforming a planet. "Sorry," Maria answered, rubbing her eyes as her reply rippled down the invisible thread joining her to the mermaid. "Geology's not my favorite subject... plus, the teacher's gone off on some story, I think."  
  
Sessyne's spirit settled itself, the ripple of her presence working its way up the thread towards her, disrupted only by the occasional tremor of her pains. It'd been two weeks since the two of them were hunted down by the leviathan, and while Maria's life was slowly settling back into a routine, Sessyne's recovery was slow.  
  
Each time she expressed her concern to the mermaid, though, Sessyne was quick to remind her that the healing process took time. "I'm not going to get better overnight," she'd told Maria one evening as the young girl lay out on her bed at home. "The medical team at your colony said it may be weeks, maybe months, before they're confident that I have healed completely."  
  
"It just worries me," Maria said at the time. "It feels wrong that you're cooped up like this."  
  
Sessyne gave her assurance, though, that she was more than comfortable; she also promised she would ask the science team to give her permission to let Maria down to the pools to see her. The possibility of seeing Sessyne again, face to face, made her happier. It was one thing to be permanently connected to one another, but even that soul bond didn't relieve her desire to physically be in Sessyne's company again.  
  
"They've been making sure you're not bored, right?" Maria asked presently, trying to focus as much on the lecture as she was on her conversation with Sessyne. "I'm sure it gets pretty boring down there..."  
  
"Do not worry about me. I have been enjoying myself talking to the scientists who have been caring for my injuries. One has even been teaching me the rules of a game from your world, called chess?" the light sound of Sessyne's laughter rippled through Maria. "They are using a large touch-display in the pool to allow me to move my pieces; my hands are much too big to move the pieces on a human-size board."  
  
"My Papa taught me chess before, when I was little. I think I remember the rules..."  
  
"Maria?"  
  
She sat up, started to hear a voice that wasn't Sessyne's. Her gaze darted around before finding the teacher, the older man standing, hands folded over one another at his waist. "Maria, can you answer my question, please?"  
  
Maria cursed to herself, and apologized to Sessyne before focusing entirely on the classroom around her. "I'm sorry," she answered, quickly skimming through the notes on her tablet to try and catch up. "I... I didn't hear the question."  
  
The class chuckled, but quickly settled back down. "I was asking for the name of main gas employed to raise the density of a terraformed world's atmosphere, thus raising its surface temperature?"  
  
"Oh. Oh!" She stood up, facing the teacher. "Carbon dioxide. It's carbon dioxide."  
  
The teacher sighed, visibly, and turned back to the large display mounted to the wall behind him, covered in diagrams of planetary atmospheres. "Very good, Maria, though I would appreciate in the future if you would keep your attention on your work when you're in class?"  
  
"Right," Maria said, and tried to ignore the thread wrapped around her heart for the time being. "Sorry."

 

~

The cafeteria for the colony school was outdoors, filling a platform overhanging the end of the wing that held the rest of the school. Large, synthetic, fiber awnings could unfold to cover the platform in the event of a storm; in the worst weather, lunch was simply held inside the classrooms themselves. But the open air cafeteria, it was argued, helped better condition children to live permanently on Rahabat.  
  
Maria sat by the rail, looking over the side at the waves lapping at the root-like structure that supported the colony. Eventually, Sessyne would return to the ocean. Would she still be able to feel her when she was further away? Being separated even the relatively short distance of the length of the colony itself felt as though it stretched their connection taunt; what would a further separation do to her?  
  
"Hey?"  
  
Maria looked up, her tablet clicking against the table. Cate stood across the table from her holding a tray of warm food and fresh fruit punch. "I thought I'd come sit with you," she said, biting her lip as she hovered the tray over the spot opposite Maria. "If that's okay."  
  
Maria blinked, then shrugged. "Sure, I guess so."  
  
The other girl set her food down and slid onto the bench across from her. Her fingers rested against the cap on her bottle of punch, sliding her fingertips over the rim of the metal lid without making any effort to unscrew it from the bottle's top. "I wanted to... I wanted to apologize about what happened the other day. I've been thinking on it since then... and I wanted to say I was sorry."  
  
Maria stared at her, a celery stick half in her mouth, her fingers still grasping the end of it. She bit through with a snap, quickly chewing up the bite of food, her eyes stuck on Cate the whole time. "It's... it's really nothing. It's done and over with."  
  
"No, what I said was mean. I can't even imagine what you went through." Cate rested her elbows on the table, leaning over her tray of food, chin balanced on the backs of her hands. "I guess... I guess part of it, is that... I had my meeting with a Project counselor yesterday. Next week will be my trip, and I'm... I'm honestly a bit scared. Especially after what happened to you."  
  
"It's... it's not scary, actually." Maria blinked; without even thinking about it, she reached out one hand across the table, laying her fingers against Cate's hands. Her fingers were locked together, she realized, and her arms were shaking, down to the elbows. "It's really not. Going inside of them, inside of an Ichthyian is relaxing, actually. I felt like I was in a warm bath." Her eyes closed for a moment, remembering the sensation of settling into Sessyne's stomach. She could almost smell the mint-like scent of the medium that cushioned her, eased her into her connection with her host.  
  
Cate nodded; her bottle of juice made a snap as she finally twisted off the cap, raising the drink to her lips. "And being... in their head?"  
  
"It's a bit of a shock, but they try to help you through it. It's weird to have arms and... and a tail, but you can't move them." She laughed, rubbing the back of her head, ruffling her own hair. She pulled her hand back from Cate's, sitting up straight. "They really do help you through it, though."  
  
"And what happens... what happens if I become as attached to the one I bond with, as you did with yours?"  
  
Maria said nothing; they sat by the railing, listening to the waves below and the white noise of their classmates eating and chatting and otherwise going about their afternoon. All of it faded to a distant murmur, leaving the two of them alone in a pocket of the world. What was there to say? She wasn't even sure what would become of her and Sessyne, yet.  
  
"If that happens," said Maria, doing her best to smile, to look confident, "then I guess we'll find out, together."

 

~

Dr. Erin Greene's office was hard to imagine as such; the idea of an office summoned up the idea of a very sterile, pristine environment to Maria. The school principal's office had walls of polished composite, a metal and glass table with sharp lines and crisp, clean surfaces. Largely, it was all done to avoid bring non-biodegradable materials to Rahabat; metal would corrode and oxidize, glass eventually pulverize into silica, as would the composite ceramics and woods. Everything would circulate back into the planet's natural environment over time.  
  
Unfortunately, that mostly meant that everything in the colony looked polished, too crisp, too perfect. Dr. Greene's office, though, was anything but. The sound of water cascading gently down one of the walls, burbling into a bed of stones along one edge of the floor, filled the air with a lightly, barely noticed sound, but one that was constantly present. The scent of lavender, both from a pair of candles by the arched glass wall behind Dr. Greene's chair, as well as from the kettle kept warm on a small, electric burner behind Maria, tickled at her nose, making it easier to settle back against the cushions she rested against.  
  
"You mentioned last week," Dr. Greene started, pouring herself a cup of tea, "that you've been thinking a great deal about love, lately."  
  
Maria nodded, turning to watch the gray-haired woman carefully drop two cubes of sugar into her tea, stirring the drink lightly with a spoon. "I have," she said, nodding slowly.  
  
Dr. Greene crossed the room, settling down into her own chair. Her hands cradled her teacup. She seemed, Maria thought, to enjoy the warmth of her drink as much as she did the scent or taste of it. "That's not entirely unusual. Most boys and girls your age are starting into their first, serious relationships at your age. Their first forays into romantic love, intimate love."  
  
"Has anyone..." Maria started, looking up at the counselor as the older woman slowly sipped at her tea. "Has anyone ever fallen in love with an Ichthyian before? Has there ever been a human and an Ichthyian who stayed together like that?"  
  
Dr. Greene paused, her fingers curling around her tea cup, almost caressing its smooth surface. She set it down quietly onto its saucer, the cup hardly making a sound as she settled it into place. "Humans and Ichthyians have lived together here, on Rahabat, for a little more than a century, Maria. We've had a fairly long history together so far... when I was your own age, our two species looked at one another with suspicion. We intruded upon their world, though we meant no harm; they were more powerful, more knowledgeable about the environment, and could easily use that to their advantage."  
  
She leaned closer towards Maria, her arms laying against her knees, hands grasping one another. "When the Companionhood Project was first put into place, it was our way-- from both sides, as it was an idea both our peoples had-- it was a way for us to close the divide between us. A way for us to learn to trust one another, and depend on one another, so that neither side felt threatened by the other."  
  
Maria blinked, thinking back to the lecture she was given at the beginning of the term. None of the adults involved ever mentioned this detail. "I thought it was about... about exploring the ocean. About working together to better understand the..."  
  
"Well, yes, that's part of what it's about." Dr. Greene smiled, covering her mouth for a moment with one hand. "Officially, yes, it's a scientific partnership between humanity and Ichthyians. A way for us both to study the ocean of Rahabat. They've been exploring this planet for millenia and still are only familiar with a fraction of its biosphere. And we would be unable to practically explore this world on our own, without bringing tons hardware from Earth. But you've heard all of that before."  
  
"No... the real intention of the Companionhood Project is to bring our species together, for us to understand and come to care for one another. Your relationship with Sessyne, born out of how entangled your souls have become, represents an evolution of the Project that no one expected, at least not so soon."  
  
Maria went wide-eyed, lost for words. This was something that was meant to happen? "You... you wanted me to... wanted...?"  
  
Dr. Greene shook her head, reaching out to rest her hand on Maria's shoulder. The grip on her was firm, but comforting; an anchor when she felt she was going to float away. "It's not anything like that, Maria. You were told that going so deep into an Ichthyian's psyche was dangerous, I imagine, and it is. It's extraordinarily dangerous, because of the risk of losing one's own identity. I was honestly concerned about the possibility when the Project Committee consulted with me regarding your class's participation this year. I almost asked to have you excluded, but decided against it in the end."  
  
"Naturally, only you and Sessyne know exactly what happened in your time together, in the ocean. But from what I've seen, Maria, something inside of your has opened up. You're more outspoken in class; you participate more. You've been more distracted, but I think that this is partly out of your concern for Sessyne. It takes a very special person to get through a person's skin like that."  
  
"Am..." Maria said, her head reeling. Were the people who ran the Project wanting humans and Ichthyians to fall in love? "Am I in love with Sessyne? Like my Mama and Papa are, with one another?"  
  
"Are you? There's no way to know yet, I think. You're young, Maria, as is your relationship with Sessyne. There's no telling what will become of it. You may prefer to have a human lover, eventually; you and Sessyne live in very different worlds, and it will take an extraordinary sense of compromise on both your parts to make a relationship between the two of you work in the long term, if that's what you want."  
  
Dr. Greene stood up and walked towards Maria, leaning her hand on the arm of Maria's chair as she knelt down in front of her. "But I think-- as your counselor, and as a woman who has known love, so many kinds of love-- I think that you should give it the chance. To not dwell on whether it is possible or not, or if it's normal or not, but simply to see if that is where life takes the two of you. Maybe it will work, and maybe not. But either way, the bond the two of you have is inseparable and will continue to join you to one another, no matter where your lives go from here. That's what love is, Maria. Pure and simple."  
  
There was only one thing left to do. And it had to be done, face to face. "Dr. Greene," Maria said, gathering herself together. "I want to speak to Sessyne. I want to go to her."  
  
"I know that she's still being treated, and she needs to rest to allow her wounds to close completely." Dr. Greene smiled though and pushed herself back up onto her feet. "But I will contact the team that's been working with her, and see what I can arrange."  
  
Maria smiled, feeling her heart swell at the thought of being so close to Sessyne again. "Thank you, doctor."

 

~

The colony had a very simple shape to it: its various wings radiated from a central hub like spokes on a wheel, joined together by soft connections that could ride up and down as the ocean moved below it. The central column dropped down through the seawater until it anchored into the ocean floor far below, while the ends of each wing were similarly secured into bedrock by intricate webs of durable cabling that also served to support miniature ecosystems for the lifeforms that lived in the waters around the colony.  
  
The top of the central column was open as an observation deck, a domed glass enclosure surrounded by a round, open platform. Maria came up here when she wanted to get away from everything within the colony, looking out over the sea, watching the reflection of thousands of stars and Rahabat's twin moons playing over the surface.  
  
She was deep in quiet, simply listening to the distant sound of waves, when she heard one of doors from the dome behind her open and close. She looked back, and sighed as her father walked across the deck towards her.  
  
"I thought you might be up here," he said, and leaned his arms onto the rail beside her. "You've been coming up here at night for years. I used to worry, when you were little, that you might fall over the rail somehow."  
  
Maria rolled her eyes, the sea breeze blowing through her hair. "There's a safety net just below the deck. I would have been fine."  
  
"Well, yes, but it's still scary."  
  
The two of them looked out at the waters in silence; Maria closed her eyes, shutting out all sense but sound. "You know," he started, his eyes still staring out over the sea, "I could honestly say the same of how your Mama and I feel right now. We want to be there to guide you, to help you understand how you are feeling, but... neither of us have anything that could possibly help you."  
  
He sighed, and shook his head. "And that's crushing, as a father, to have no idea what your little girl is going into, to have nothing to give her as she goes forward." His arms shifted, one elbow resting on the metal railing as he ran his hand back through black hair, tangled by the wind. "Dr. Patasaya told me that you and Sessyne became one person, one soul, for a few hours. And that whatever bond you formed while you were together like that was so firmly set in place that... that even now, there's a piece of each of you in the other."  
  
"Papa," Maria said, looking up at her father. As much as he tried to hide it, she could see the sparkle of starlight as it reflected on his tears. "I'm still your little girl. I'm still Maria."  
  
"But that's the thing; you are, and you aren't, darling. You will always be my Maria, you'll always be your Mama and I's baby girl." His chest swelled as he breathed deep, pushing his weight off of the railing. "Part of you, though, is something completely unfamiliar to either of us."  
  
He stepped closer to her, wrapping an arm around Maria's shoulder; she laid her head against his side, feeling the light shake of his body as he tried to keep his composure. "It happens to every mother and father, eventually. Their child goes off, meets someone they love, and they exchange something very close, very intimate. And that changes a person, Maria. It changes their outlook on the world, it changes how they feel about themselves. I am a different person from who I was when I fell in love with your mother. And she is a different person from who she was as a child."  
  
"I feel..." Maria leaned on the rail, looking out past its boundary, over the starfish-like arms of the colony, polished surfaces lit by the moonlight. She felt as small as this station, floating in the vast sea; small as this world, floating in the vastness of space. "I feel overwhelmed. I don't really know what to do, next."  
  
Her father held her tight for a moment, smiling down at her. "It takes a bit of time, darling. So take your time. The two of you will figure out what works best for your both. That's how the rest of us do it." He smiled, closing his eyes as he unwrapped his arm from around Maria. "Perhaps your Mama and I might still be able to  help you with this, after all."

 

~

The day came, at last, where she could meet Sessyne again, face to face.  
  
She was nervous as she descended the spiral stairs into the lower levels of the colony, but she was not alone. Dr. Greene followed her, telling her that Sessyne was still injured, and not to tax her stamina and strength too much. If Sessyne was tired, she should rest; Maria could stay with her, but she shouldn't push Sessyne to hold a conversation longer than she was physically able to.  
  
It was okay, Maria assured her. She knew when Sessyne felt up to speaking to her, and when she didn't. It would be okay.  
  
The glass and metal door slid open; Dr. Greene gestured through the open doorway as she looked down at Sessyne. "I won't presume to intrude on your time with Sessyne," she said, and took a step back away from Maria. "This is all for the two of you, from here out."  
  
Maria nodded and stepped through the doorway, the door sliding shut behind her, leaving her alone in the pool room with the Ichthyian.  
  
There was no waiting for Sessyne this time, no wondering where she might be; the mermaid laid out in the shallows, half in and half out of the water, on her belly. Maria hurried across the deck, as much as her legs could carry her. Her shoes clapped against the floor, the sound echoing around the room. "Sessyne! I'm here, Sessyne!"  
  
Sessyne turned her head, looking over her shoulder to see Maria approaching. "Maria," she said, thin lips spreading out in a smile. She winced as she turned her body, Maria able to see where her skin pulled against the bandaged scars wrapping around her sides, back, and tail. "The doctors told me you were coming to see me... It appears they were going to speak to Dr. Greene just as she was coming to speak with them."  
  
Maria laughed and slipped out of her shoes, rolling the legs of her pants up as she waded out into the water in front of Sessyne. "I just missed you so much. I missed seeing you."  
  
"And I missed you, as well." The mermaid lowered her head, settling down on her forearms, allowing her tail to slide further back into the water. "It feels much stronger when you're closer to me, doesn't it? The bond between us... it's more soothing when we are close by."  
  
"It is," Maria said, and breathed deep. Sure enough, the thread she imagined tied around her heart felt as though it squeezed more gently; the cord between them no longer felt as strained and pulled taunt. "That's... that's actually what I wanted to talk about. If you feel up to it. I felt it was something I should talk to you about like this, and not across our bond."  
  
"You're worried," Sessyne said, eyes half closed. One of her hands reached out, the webbing between her fingers brushing against Maria's head, "about what it will be like when I return to open water. That the separation will be too painful for you."  
  
Maria nodded, leaning into Sessyne's hand. Slowly, it curled under her, scooping her up out of the water; Maria laid back, resting her head against the base of the mermaid's thumb. She'd forgotten the feel of Sessyne's skin, the soft, smooth texture, cool against her own. She remembered how startled she'd been when she first touched the mermaid, how much that coolness seemed strange. Now, it was the most relaxing thing she could imagine.  
  
"Being across the station from you made my heart feel like it was being squeezed tight," Maria said, pressing her cheek into Sessyne's skin. "When you're miles away, in the ocean... I don't know how I'll be able to take it." She turned, looking up at the giant face gazing down at her. "Is it that difficult for you?"  
  
"It can be, sometimes. You are more used to being lonely, though... the idea of being alone is so... unimaginable for my people. Even when we need time apart, our souls are always near to one another. We are more used to the distances involved than we are."  
  
"What are we, Sessyne? You and me..." Maria blushed. "You make it sound like I'm your lover. Your mate. Like I'm part of your family, or pod, or whatever you think of it as..." She sighed and sat up, pressing her hands down into Sessyne's palm until she pushed herself upright in the middle of the mermaid's hand. "We're two completely different species, who live in two completely different environments. You live deep in the ocean, and I can never go down there without your help. And you can never come up on land, out if the water, except through looking out through our bond together. There's always going to be that barrier there. We'll always be separated from one another, at least in part."  
  
Sessyne was silent for the longest time, or what felt like forever, to Maria. Even the bond between them was silent, still, a feeling she was completely unused to anymore. Even when the mermaid was asleep, she could still feel her thoughts, her dreams, floating about inside her own head. Now, though, the mermaid was entirely silent. "In truth," Sessyne said, her voice quiet, "I felt... very deeply about you, starting with the moment that I met you."  
  
"You..." Maria said, slackjawed. "Really? But..."  
  
"You were so lonely, Maria, so sad. I know that, normally, the bond between an Ichthyian and their human companion is only meant to last a few days. I knew you would likely go on with your life, just as others have before you, once our time was up. But..." Sessyne's eyes closed, her chest swelling as she breathed deep from the salt-scented air. "But as soon as I met you, I never wanted to let go of you."  
  
"The truth is, the reason we are taught to push back on a human consciousness when it is inside of us is that, what a human experiences as their body is consumed is what two of our kind experience during mating."  
  
Maria felt her cheeks turn red, her face hot at the image conjured up by Sessyne's words. The mermaid, too, was blushing, parts of her face turning a deeper shade of violet from the rest of her skin. "We... you mean, when I..." Maria sputtered, at an utter loss of words.  
  
"When we first met, I said that I would share my heart with you, Maria. And you said that I did not understand what that meant, for a human." Sessyne's blush faded, her hand lifting Maria closer to her face. "But I do. I have never known anyone I wanted to share my heart as much as I wanted to with you. I wanted you to never feel lonely again, because I would be with you. I gave up the capacity to bond with another human when our souls merged; my bond to you is too strong, too intimately tied, to ever be shared with another of your kind."  
  
Maria reached out, wrapping her arms around Sessyne's thumb, her own heart pounding within her. "Do you really mean that? We've barely gotten to know each other. I hardly know you, and you barely know me. Do I even have a choice of what happens now, what happens next?"  
  
Sessyne bowed her head. "You always have a choice. We can learn to depend less upon it, to more easily live with the separation, if either of us chooses someone other than each other. The choice is always yours, Maria, even if some paths are more difficult than others. Whatever you choose, though, I will be there to guide you through to its end."  
  
"Of course I choose you! I never want to be apart from you again, Sessyne!" Maria clung to the mermaid's thumb, pulling herself up onto her feet, relying on the digit for support when it became clear to her that her own legs were shaking too much to hold her up. "I want to spend the rest of my life knowing you... I don't know if that will change someday, I don't know, but right now, as I am right now, all I want is to share my life with you."  
  
"That is all I need to know, Maria."  
  
The mermaid's hand moved, carrying Maria to Sessyne's lips. She could feel cool breaths blowing down on her from above each time the mermaid breathed in or out, could feel the flutter of her eyebrows when she blinked. Maria dropped to her knees, laying her hands and cheek against Sessyne's lips, kissing the soft flesh before her. Their hearts seemed to beat in unison, as one being, a single pulse echoing in both directions along the thread that joined the two of them.  
  
There were all manner of practicalities to think about. How would they live together? What sort of home did you make for a giant mermaid and her smaller, human lover? How would you spend time together, sleep together, do all of the things that couples did together? Maria had no idea. But that was for the next day, and the day after that, and so on. Life would be a journey, a never-ending exploration into a space that was unknown between their species, and between the two of them.  
  
There was nothing to be afraid of, though. She was not alone. The thought reassured her as she and Sessyne curled up together in the pool's shallows, the mermaid's hand cradling Maria against her face. Whatever happened next, she was not alone, and never would be, again.

 

~

_The End_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I want to simply thank everyone for their encouragement and kindness; I don't honestly think I would have followed through on finishing this story without the encouragement and love that others have shared with me. The first chapter, as I mentioned then, could have easily stood on its own. But I'm glad I continued writing, and I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> I would also like to especially thank my spouse, thestorieswesay; the whole idea of alien mermaids was something I thought up because I thought it would make them happy, so I hope it did-- as much as they've let on so far, I think that was a success! I would also like to thank both RunsWithBooks and SithLordNergal over on DeviantArt, who both offered a lot of suggestions and editing advice as I went forward with the story. I'll work on incorporating all of the technical edits to things in the near future, but it was important to me to finish the story first and worry about cleaning up the writing a bit later. 
> 
> I don't know if I'll do anything further in this world; I almost like leaving Maria and Sessyne's relationship open-ended like this; you can imagine it going however you please. I may do things with other characters someday. I feel like I gave myself plenty of roads to go down should I ever want to come back to Rahabat to write more, so the possibilities are always there.


End file.
